Pete wrote:
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?
That would be some keyboard! Wonder how many different alphabets,
logograms, and syllabaries there are?
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.
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...
Quite a significant difference between KDE and other desktops such as
Gnome, XFCE, etc.
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.
Thanks for the edu info, Pete. Quite interesting!
