I have had the identical wish. I write in French and German, live in a bilingual country, and my name contains an ü, so you can see that this issue has concerned me since I got my Apple II+ clone back in 1981. Fortunately, I bought myself a German keyboard with all 105 keys, instead of those stunted keyboards they sell in North America that are missing a whole slew of keys, like ° (what, we don't have degrees here?) and all the rest. Why don't they just make one standard universal keyboard for everyone? Say, a keyboard that is designed for use with UTF-8, supports all (!) of the keys, and has the letters arranged alphabetically for the 99% of people who use computers who are finger pickers. It would sure be a lot better, I'd say. I dread the day it breaks down. I'll have to get a friend in Germany to send me a new one. Or maybe I could get my hands on a French-Canadian one, if it has all the accents, unlauts, etc. At work, where I am forced to use Windows (how tempted I am to use one of those super live discs from Mandrake or Knoppix, but it could likely get me in a lot of trouble, due to security concerns), I have set my keyboard to use the International mapping. It works great. Under KDE, in the control centre, Peripherals/Regional/Keyboard/Xkb, you could set the right menu key to become the compose key. This will only work in KDE, and I have it set, just for those stubborn applications that refuse to recognize my German (latin1) default layout. But the following is what you need... Go into the KDE menu, scan down to system settings, select keyboard, and at the very bottom, you will find a setting called U.S. International. This ought to do what you want. It makes an entry into the /etc/sysconfig/keyboard file, which you should have a look at, so that you can change it manually, if things ever should go awry down the road. If there are any keys, like the £ symbol, which gets moved to somewhare that you are not accustomed (I am assuming you are in GB), you can always use a program, I can't remember which, but it could be xmodmap. With the program I am thinking of, you can either set character mappings globally, or just for a specific user, by creating a ~/.xmodmap file. I don't like this latter solution much, because it means you have to load the wrong keymap and then tweak it with mappings to get it right. I like to have it right from the start, but it might be your only option. Way back, I wrote myself a custom keymap, but once I got the German keyboard, I threw it away. Quelle folie! Also, it seems that the font server has changed and I can't quite figure out how to make a custom keymap anymore. They used to be gzipped files that were just huge tables, starting with a keysym and a bunch of entries after each, the first for plain, the second for shifted, the third for control, the fourth for alt, the fifth for shifted control, then shifted alt, then control alt and so on. This was very handy and one could have every possible key right on the keyboard at all times. There is a program, xed, or something, that tells you which code a key is sending and you have to map this code to the character. It was gruelling work, but the result was a thing of beauty. In brief, the US Int'l should do what you want. ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
