dead-key problem

[Gatis Spats]

Hi folks!

I've just installed AW 1.1.4 (still best WYSIWYG editor i know) on 
RedHat8 (GNOME) and spent two evenings trying to make the 'dead-keys' 
work correctly (without much success). Looks like the reason is some 
encoding stuff as my .abw files headers starts with <?xml version="1.0" 
encoding="UTF-8"?> (encoding is 'default' according to statusbar).

Below is the snippet that i found in the danish deadkey how-to ...

.. neither compose nor dead keys will work in X11R6 applications unless 
these are compiled with support for accented (8-bit) character input. An 
example of such an application is |GNU emacs| version 19.30 (or higher.) 
[..and openoffice ... and mozilla]. Some X11 applications still do not 
support this input method. Eventually this situation might improve, but 
until that happens you can either hack your applications or submit 
polite bug reports to the program authors... 
[http://www.icewalkers.com/Linux/Howto/Danish-HOWTO-2.html#deadkeys]

I am not quite sure if this is the case, but it looks like my Compose 
file which is under
|
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/iso8859-13 and |

/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1|

does not work (well - actualy display shows modified characters but not 
the ones i need - and i really do not get where this behavior is 
predefined!).
I would appreciate your recommendations (links, comments, anything else) 
that would help to solve it
(There is a way to 'hack' 1.0.X versions by changing (re-making) abiword 
default fonts with MS true type fonts - but seams that it can not be 
used with 1.1.X? as common gnome (X11) fonts are used now ! Although i 
doubt if the fonts are problem as driver (key-map file actually) wich 
uses much more simple logic (right-alt key (and is moch more 
inconvenient)) works ok)...or maybe there are source files that can be 
modified to set iso8859-13 as default?

/gatis