Re: [Evolution] Key Sequences for special ascii characters...

[Tom Ball <Tom Ball Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2002-09-19 at 12:55, Tony Earnshaw wrote:
> The easiest way for me, as mortal user, to turn my keyboard into a
> German keyboard, is to go into an xterm (command-line screen, like an
> MSDOS command screen but subtly different, you don't have to go out of
> Evo) and enter 'setxkbmap de'. Hey presto, German keyboard, which will
> print too :-)
>
> "But I don't want a German keyboard," you say; "I just want an umlaut."
>
> It's a hard life, Sean, a hard life.

Life is not that hard, at least for entering international characters.
:-)

On Redhat 7.3, running "dumpkeys --compose-only" should show a table of
international characters that can be created by holding down the
"compose" key and hitting two characters.  On my system and locale
(en_US), unlaut is shown as being composed of a 'u' and '"'.

The problem is that by default a compose key isn't defined in the locale
I use.  To fix this, I added "keycode 115 = Multi_key Multi_key
Multi_key" to /etc/X11/Xmodmap; this maps the unused "Windows" key to
compose.  Keycode 115 was discovered by running xev, so pick any unused
key you want.

That mostly worked, except that 115 has keyboard repeat on by default,
which makes using it as a modifier difficult.  I couldn't figure out how
to modify this in X, so as a hack I added "/usr/bin/X11/xset -r 115" as
a GNOME startup program (GNOME Control Center/Advanced).  If someone
knows the correct way to make this change, please let me know.  In any
event, it appears to work.

If this is too much work (or my instructions don't work on your system),
there is always the Programs/Utilities/GNOME Character Map application. 

Tom