Re: Accented Characters - How to type from standard keyboard?

[Michael Lange <klappnase@freenet.de>]

Hi,

Thus spoketh "Thomas H. George" <lists@tomgeorge.info> 
unto us on Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:19:09 -0500:

> Ripit created a directory name which starts with an accented character.
> I want to rename the directory.  With xlsfonts, xfontsel and xfd I have
> found a font set which contains the character but have not figured out
> how to use it from a standard US keyboard.  Is there an easy way to do
> this?
> 

You can set up a compose key; here I have added

    Option         "XkbOptions" "compose:Super_R"

to the Keyboard section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and now I can use the right
one of the "Windows" keys as compose key, most of the default key
combinations are quite intuitive, for example if I press the ComposeKey
followed by an "a" and an apostrophe I get á , or an "o" followed by a
slash gives ø and so on.
According to http://www.linuxhowtos.org/Tips%20and%20Tricks/compose.htm
you can even temporarily set up a compose key with for example

   setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us -option compose:rwin

I haven't tried this myself, though.

You can even setup custom key combinations in case you can locate the
correct file for that; here I have a file ~/.XCompose, but changes to
this file are ignored by gtk apps , and xterm and friends seem to be
unable to handle certain characters.

Regards

Michael

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