Tony Newman wrote,
>What I have done in the past is to hold the ALT key down and enter the
>decimal value on the numeric keypad (with the num-lock key off). I just
>double-checked this, and it works under OS/2 and Windows (in simple text
>editing programs), but not under Linux. At least, it didn't work here
>under Thunderbird, under Kate (an editor), or in a text-mode editor
>(joe). A pity, that was a handy way of getting characters from the
>line-drawing set into a text file.
The ALT-numberpad method is a Windows-ism...I'm unaware of ANY Linux
software the recognizes it.
But Linux has other ways. If you're using Xwindows, make sure XKB is
enabled...the following lines in the InputDevice section of my xorg.conf
do the trick:
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "intl"
This activates a keyboard mode that makes my right Windows-logo key act as
a "compose key" (a.k.a. "multikey"). Pressing it causes the next two
keystrokes to be converted into a single character (usually one outside
the normal ASCII range).
The available two-character combinations for the compose key are
determined by the current locale (as specified in the LC_ALL or LANG
environment variables). If no current locale is set, the default "C"
locale is assumed, which doesn't define any compose key combinations.
On my system, the locale (as determined by LANG) is "en_US". This causes
X programs to load the compose key combinations from the file
/usr/X11R6/lib/x11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose. This is a plain text file,
which is easy to read to figure out what the compose key combinations are.
For example, (right-win)a' gives "�" ("a" with an accute accent),
(right-win)o" gives "�" ("o" with an umlaut), and (right-win)ss gives "�"
(the German double-s).
Just about all of the ISO-8859-1 characters are available, and they're
much easier to remember than the ALT-numberpad codes...for example, a
single quote generally puts an accute accent on any character that's
willing to take one, a double-quote adds an umlaut, and a backquote adds a
grave accent.
- Neil Parker
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