Pierre Abbat wrote: >On Thursday 29 July 2004 00:08, Graham Monk wrote: > > >>Hi, >> >>I need to generate some French text on a US English >>keyboard, I have looked through some of the Archives >>but no luck, is there a search function? >> >>Can anyone give me a few pointers? >> >> > >I would suggest switching the keyboard layout. KDE and Gnome both allow you to >have multiple keyboard layouts. > >On KDE 3.1: >Run Control Center (it's in Settings, or on the panel where it looks like a >terminal with a wrench). Go to Regional and Accessibility+Keyboard layout and >pick U.S. with deadkeys (not sure, I haven't tried that) or Dvorak (the one I >use). You can then type accented letters by hitting AltGr-accent and then the >letter. AltGr is the right Alt key (it is so labeled on a German keyboard). > >
The deadkeys works like this -- you have certain keys: ' " ~ ` ^ that do nothing at first when you press them. If you follow that with a space, it will type these normal characters. If you type ^ then the letter o you get ?. You can get many more than just French special letters, such as ? and ?. Now in Scribus I can get a c with a cedilla with ' and c, but here in Thunderbird it gives me ?, so you may find some individual program quirks. If you're going to do a fair amount of typing with foreign language special characters, it's probably worth switching the keyboard (then switch back later because not easily being able to type ' will drive you nuts). Greg
