Fred James wrote,
>Has anyone had any success in adding accents to characters from the
>keyboard in OpenOffice? The "help" documentation is unclear, and I
>haven't been able to figure this one out as yet.
As Larry already pointed out, this can be done by going to the Insert menu
and choosing "Special Character...".
If you want to do it entirely from the keyboard, you can type the
ISO-8859-1 (Western European) characters in almost any software, not just
OpenOffice.org, by making sure a few settings are set in your X server
configuration.
The settings work that for me (using X11 version 6.7.0 from X.Org) are these:
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "intl"
These belong in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, in the InputDevice section for the
keyboard. If you have to change anything to enable these settings, then
you'll have to restart your X server to make the new settings take
effect.
These settings tell X that I have a 104-key keyboard (with Windows-logo
keys and a menu key), and that the right Windows-logo key is the
international character key. Accented characters are three-key sequences,
starting with the right Windows-logo key--for example, � ("a" with an
accute accent) is "right-Windows-logo apostrophe a". (The other way also
works: "right-Windows-logo a apostrophe".)
Other accented characters are made similarly. They all start with the
right Windows-logo key, and then you type the accent and the character to
be accented. The accenting keys are:
Accent Key to press
------ ------------
accute ' (apostrophe or single-quote)
grave ` (backward single-quote)
umlaut " (double-quote)
tilde ~ (tilde)
You're not limited to just the accented characters. I believe you can
get all the ISO-8859-1 characters--for example "�" and "�" (Spanish
upside-down ! and ?) are "right-Win !!" and "right-Win ??", and "�"
(paragraph mark) is "right-Win p!". The complete list of key combinations
is in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose.
If you're accustomed to the Macintosh way of entering accented characters,
this will probably seem very familiar. If you're accustomed to Windows
ALT keycodes, you'll probably find the X key combinations much easier to
remember than all those random numbers.
- Neil Parker
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