Just here to say thanks to Marcel for this great trick and to Sjors for his Dutch variation!!
I'm a newbie with Linux and this was very important for me to find out.

Thanks again!!
Marlène

In my (Dutch) version of KDE there is no seperate "U.S. English w/deadkeys" layout. However you can add another "U.S. English" layout and then select "intl" from the variant dropdownbox.

Hi,
For years, I have always being using ONLY a US keyboard...And I am French.
Why? Probably because I was facing so many problems in the past with software you cannot really use in a French version...
Granted, things are getting better...(not really sure ;-))
Now, I know the ALT+thatdarnedcode for ea. and every accent or cedilla.
And it is the way I work with...Windows...
For Linux, I cannot do the same thing. Why that?
I faced a LOT of problems with the locales. I had to recompile my kernel and stay with US only. Do you suggest to create a new "french user", or simply to get the trick to use my ALT+darnedcode. Is there a trick? Thank you

If Marcel's instructions don't work and you have version 3.4.x of KDE try this
(Not being a writer I hope this makes sense):

Go to the KDE Control Center. Once the Control Center page appears, click on Regional and Accessibility. Once that appears, click on Keyboard Layout. Then when that page appears, click on the line saying - U.S. English (us) - that is in the middle top (more or less) of the page and make sure that line is high lighted (back ground behind the text is colored) if it isn't none of the below will work.

In the bottom right corner of the page there is a drop down box. The label to the left of that box is Layout Variant and in the drop down box it should say basic. Change that to intl and click on apply.

After that, in any new window or program you start things will work somewhat like what he describes above.

If you want to type the word don't , you have to press the ' key twice before you type the t . It should work the same for any other accent.

Just a quick note for readers of this article. THe doc project at openoffice.org
has had a HOW-TO available since 2020/04/22 on this very subject.
See http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/various_topics/Howto_special_char.pdf
for the latest edition.

I am very happy with a Spanish keyboard, because it has almost all keys I need for Dutch, French, German and Spanish. The only letter missing is the Beta or Scharfes S letter for German (often written as double s). Now in window I had my ALT 225, but in KDE how do you do that without complicated keyboard switching?

Spanish keyboard has the ñ key and so there is no tilde key like on US-keyboards. Now how would you produce a tilde like is used in Unix to indicate the home directory (very useful!).

Here's a short note on how to set up an international keyboard in linux.

This is awfully silly. If you just use a layout like U.S. English w/ISO9995-3, then it will work like a mac. Press right-alt + ; then e to get é, or alt+' a to get â, alt+s for ß, etc. It's very simple, and requires no switching of layouts.

Excellent and useful article. But what about non-Western characters, Central European for instance?

In KDE it's easy, because I can switch between various keyboard layouts, a method I find easier than US with dead keys even for French. But what about other window managers or wine/crossover?

What would be the easiest way to input non-Western Latin characters?

Hi
Sorry for my 0.10 cents worth. To deal with the french keyboard you're right it would be a pain. The A is at the Q ect. but there is an alternative, the french canadian keyboard has all the accents but on an american layout. It would be useless to most american but to somebody dealing with other languages at the ridiculous price they sell them, it might be worth getting.

Dear Mr. Marcel Gagné I would like to thank you for this article.
I do, however, have a coupld of things to add if you don´t mind.

NOTE: when I say hit " I mean shift+´

If you want ö
then type " with o

the same goes for ë ï ä ÿ ü and "+Shift+Letter for caps etc
So you could do for French Noël
or say for German Männer and so on

if you want ´ or `
then just hit the respective key twice

while hitting the " key twice will leave you with an empty umlaut. ---¨
You need to hit " once and then the space bar.

I have not been able to figure out how to make the keyboard output the
German double s or known as szet such as would be in Fuss
If anyone knows how to get the double s with US-w/deadkeys,
it would be appreciated if you would not mind sharing it.

Best Regards,

I made a script xkb-office.sh

setxkbmap -rules xfree86 -model -pc104 -layout de -option "deadkeys"

and xkb-scripting.sh

setxkbmap -rules xfree86 -model -pc104 -layout de -option "nodeadkeys"

to switch between Office-mode and Programmer-mode.
Those can be easily integrated into the menu (~/.fluxbox/menu).
You could add hotkeys (~/.fluxbox/keys) for faster switching.

You can just hit spacebar after a deadkey, to get the character to appear normally before a vowel or the letters c and y.

Single and double quotes may still be used as intended when followed by a blank.

Have you tried the French Canadian keyboard ...practicly same layout as the american but with the accents.

Good work!

Use fm command with an option
I don't remember now and path
to UTF-8 directory.
Then just enable the keys with
setxkeyboard...

Bye,
Mare

unicode quick reference
X keyboard shortcuts

I tried setting up keyboard options but I don´t get flags. Instead I get grey icons without superimposed flags. Works OK but can´t tell which mode is active as both icons are the same. What module am I missing?

Personnaly, when I must type a text with lot of letters which I can find on my french keyboard, I start yudit (www.yudit.org) and export my text in the good application at the end for formatting it.

If you have good unicode fonts, you can also add combining diacritical marks after the normal letter instead of precomposed letters.

Recently I found out about the power of composed characters. I used the xkb options of kxkb to define a compose key and found out that I am using file:///usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose
What I am looking for is a small map that I could print out and put next to the computer to look up the sequences, but I could find none in the web.
Does anyone make or now of such a map?

Check out the Unicode Charts page for the IDs of the characters you want to insert.

Latin characters with accents are in Latin-1 Supplement. Also available are Miscelsaneous symbols (chess pieces, smilies, and other weird stuff) and Dingbats.

For example, the Greek letter mu (micro) is 0xB5: µ (Press Ctrl+Shift+B5)
Some more stuff: ☺, ☽, ☿, ☻, ☮, ♞ and so on...
No need for images to show smilies! ☺

You wrote:

"The only catch is that you have to return the keyboard to normal (U.S. English) before you continue or you'll find that things don't work the way you expect them to. A single or double quote won't enter when you expect it to."

If you press space after the double or single quote (or any dead key) you get the that character. That way there is no need to switch keyboard layouts constantly.

As someone who spends more time than is proper writing code and scripts, I admire anybody who can put up with dead keys. Me, I use a compose key to get a selection of letters and symbols, such as ç å æ ß ž and of course é. I figured the 'windows' key had to be capable of doing _something_ useful :)

Upsides - normal text is unaltered, so no problems with accessing ticks or backticks or double quotes.

I can write my German homework (in abiword), or write in most West European languages, without difficulty - even the Icelandic þ and đ are available without having to remember character values (the only missing letters are some of the slavic variations, and Gaeilge (Irish) in the old script. Searching for foreign text in google is suddenly a whole lot easier when you can type in the correct letters!

Downsides -

The standard British keyboard doesn't come with a compose key definition, so you have to create your own map file if you want to use the compose key in the console.

For X (at least on unicode-free distros), you also have to edit the compose file in ${XLIB}/locale/*/Compose if you have want extra compose combinations, PLUS you have to define the compose key itself in .Xmodmap (I know, gnome 2.8 thinks it's better than me and will ignore ~/.Xmodmap). With a British setup you have to describe the € as a currency symbol rather than a Euro because iso-8859-1 refuses to admit the Euro can be displayed. Fun, fun, fun.

But if dead keys work for you, more power to your clavier M. Gagné.

Using the Windows equivalent, "US International" keyboard layout, I can easily enter an "¿" (which is used to open spanish questions), by presing the right side Alt key in cojuntion with the ? key. However, I have not been able to find how to enter it in Linux. I basically have to copy and paste it every time I want to use it (I forget the name of the KDE applet where I store it to make it easier). It would be nice if whoever maintains the Linux Keyboard layout woud add this character to the "U.S. English w/ deadkeys" layout.

I found a very useful set of Xandros options in the Control Centre:

Peripheral Devices => Keyboard Layout => Xkb Options:

Compose Key => one of Menu, Right Alt or Right Win-key enables compose for a single key, after which you can do the usual "'" + "e". After this single character, the keyboard reverts back to the usual behaviour.

Lars Erlandsen.

For plain text and HTML formats, WISH Supernotepad 1.3 has a fairly convenient special-character box (if I do say so myself), with more than 60 characters including all common accented characters in capital and lower case. You can leave the box open beside the text window and single-click for instant insertion of special characters; the focus then automatically returns to the text window so you can continue typing. Not quite as fast as a keyboard shortcut, maybe, but you don't have to do any keyboard tricks at all. Requires Tcl and Tk 8.4 or greater; available for download (in a tar.gz archive with a simple installation script) from "Pa Penguin's Icebox" -- http://www.geocities.com/pa_mcclamrock

KDE keyboard switching has been less than satisfactory in late releases (they had it at some point in time).

There are a number of keyboard layouts for linux, however, and an easy way to switch keyboards. For example, you can use ctrl/shift to switch between the english and hellenic keyboards by entering the following two lines in your .profile:

export LC_CTYPE=el_GR.UTF-8
setxkbmap us+el polytonic -option grp:ctrl_shift_toggle

This will enable UTF characters and set your keyboard to switch between the "us" english and hellenic "el" layout groups. You can leave the "polytonic" option out (a keyboard layout modifier for hellenic) or you can choose an alternate group switch code.

It doesn't work for me: the right-hand side of the window is greyed out and inactive.

Do you have to run kcontrol as root? If you do, it sounds like a design error to me. The old and utterly confusing way with xmodmap doesn't require root access.

Unfortunately I don't have root access on the box I'm using.

Et voilà! I can make accent marks now thanks to Monsieur Gagné! And it's *easy*, which it never was before in Linux...okay, I'm sold, I will subscribe to Tuxworld, since it appears to be what I have wanted for awhile - a "PC World" for Linux users, something with the kind of real-world help I need, and not information like how to migrate your enterprise network to Linux which is only useful if you run the IT department at General Motors.

One of the (very few) things I have missed about my Windows machine is the easy way to make foreign accent marks...my French friends were annoyed after I switched to Linux and could no longer do that.

AND I'm passing this on to all my fellow Linuxheads...as well as people I would *like* to convert to Linux (Hallelujah! Praise Lahhhh-nus!!!)