Foreign Keyboard Help Needed

[William Lamb <linuxadvocate notwires com>]

I am trying to setup my girlfriend's father on Linux.  He is Polish and
wants to be able to compose word processing documents in Polish.  He
bought a Windows Me computer several months ago and has had a very bad
time with it, so I figured this would be a good chance to make a convert
to Linux. ;-)

I have set up the computer with Ximian Gnome running on Red Hat 7.2.  My
problem is that I cannot figure out how to get the Polish characters to
work.  When I installed Red Hat, I checked the box for Polish to be
supported and I know that ISO 8859-2 fonts are installed.  I have also
installed the GKB (Gnome KeyBoard) applet for choosing between keyboard
mappings and I have all 3 Polish keyboards plus US english installed on
it.  I have tried numerous different key combinations in several
different word processing programs and I still have not been able to
produce the dotted z, slashed l or any other characters specific to the
8859-2 character set.

Can someone who uses non-8859-1 character sets tell me how to set this
up and how to produce these characters?  What word processing programs
do you use?  What are the key combinations you use to produce the
accented characters?  Did I miss something in the setup?

Thanks very much for your help,

Bill Lamb
Chicago, USA