On Sunday 13 January 2013 02:19:57 Julian Bradfield wrote: > On 2013-01-13, Leslie Turriff <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've been searching the web for information about how to type accented > > characters (French) using a US 104-key keyboard. I understand that a > > compose key is involved, but everything I've found so far has involved > > adding character<=>key mappings using xmodmap, whereas it appears that > > one does not need to do that; but there seems to be an assumption that > > just saying "press the compose key and..." magic happens. > > As others have said, most modern distributions are set up to do this > by default. > The thing to beware of is that GTK+, the toolkit used by many > applications such as Firefox etc., does its own thing with compose > processing, rather than relying on the underlying X processing. > (Sadly typical of GTK+.) > So if you succeed in working out how to change the X mappings (which > is not trivial), it won't work with GTK+ applications. I just found that out with regards to LibreOffice; and so far I haven't found anything in their docs that mentions it. I have successfully used the xmodmap method to map box characters onto the numeric keypad (which I otherwise don't use), but they don't have that effect in LibreOffice, and their docs interface seems to only cover remapping of non-glyph keys. Using the compose or deadkey methods for this purpose is not much faster than cut&paste from kcharselect. :-)
> Emacs also has its own facility, but it also uses the native X compose > mappings before its own. > > In summary, if your needs are just commonplace accents, it should just > work, and in most cases the compose sequences are obvious, and if > they're not, they're in the Wikipedia article.
