> (someone can teach me how to put the accent over the e using a linux
> desktop <smile>)

In emacs it's easy - use the latin-1-prefix input method
;; in .emacs
(custom-set-variables
 '(default-input-method (quote latin-1-prefix))
 '(current-language-environment "Latin-1"))
;; end snippet
then you enter "'e" (apostrophe+e) and it turns into 'é' (e-acute).
(Well, under recent versions of emacs it's easy; under older versions
you had to install and load the LEIM code, doable but not convenient...)

Under GNOME, you set the keyboard to "U.S. International"
and you get a similar input method of entering apostrophe+vowel
to get vowel-with-acute-accent.

Unfortunately, I found that this turns a normal apostrophe (entered
by typing 2 apostrophes in a row), into an excessively-slanted
curved apostrophe (I haven't noted what code point) in OpenOffice
(good enough for papers written for community college, but not pretty),
and wreaks havoc with trying to quote a value in Gnumeric
(such as to left-justify a string starting with a digit, as i do for the
abbr'd date in every line of my checkbook spreadsheet recently migrated
from sc to gnumeric).  Now in the course of composing this message, I
noticed that emacs-21.4.1 also turns "''" into a slanted apostrophe
under latin-1-prefix; however in emacs it is easy enough to switch in
and out of latin-1-prefix with "C-\" (Ctrl-backspace) so that is
workable for me; piddling around to change the keyboard back and
forth in GNOME would be a time sink not to mention distracting my
attention so I'd forget what i wanted to do in the first place.

I'd really like to see a solution that allows my wife and myself to
conveniently and confortably share the same computer, and write in
either English or Spanish depending on the current task or whim,
in all of at least Emacs, Firefox (webmail in either language),
Gnumeric, and OpenOffice ... ooh, i might demand Xterm too.

As for what KDE does, I'll pass this back to Jeff as he is the one
who uses KDE.  (I have my wife's computer set up with GNOME; I use
FVWM for work.)


Randall Whitman - Whizman Software Solutions
[email protected] - http://whizman.com/
909/335-0864
18 E. State St. Suite 206, Redlands CA 92373

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