On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 08:13:01PM -0600, Dale A. Raby wrote:
>
> Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut, aber.... the umlaut characters disply just
> fine on my system. What I would like to know is how you type them on an
> English keyboard. Is there some way to do that?
>
Yes, but it depends. In recent xorg, with a GB keyboard the dead
keys appear to come along automatically. The compositions are in
/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose (you can also use a
Compose key, but I haven't had recent success with that - only tried
it for some not-defined things, dead keys are easier) and the
symbols are in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us [ for the common case
of US-style QWERTY keyboards and latin alphabets ].
In practice, the dead keys are to the right of the main keys. On my
GB keyboard the keys are laid out as
0 - and _ then = and +
O P [ and { then ] and }
K L ; and : then ' and @ then # and ~
M comma and < . and > then / and ?
[ anything after a 'then' above is a dead key when used with AltGr]
and I get the following: (hope you have enough fonts for all of
these : to people not reading in xorg, sorry about all the � you
[should] see for the glyphs which your console font does not cover
;-)
AltGr = is dead cedilla, e.g. ç ķ
(i.e. AltGr with the last key of the 'A' row, then a letter)
AltGr + is dead ogonek e.g. ǫ
AltGr [ is dead diaeresis or umlaut, e.g. ä ë
AltGr { is dead ring å ů
AltGr ] is dead tilde e.g. ñ õ
AltGr } is dead macron e.g. ā ē
AltGr ; is dead acute e.g. á ć
AltGr : is dead double acute ő ű
AltGr ' is dead circumflex e.g. â ĉ
AltGr @ is dead caron e.g. č ď ȟ
AltGr # is dead grave e.g. à ò
AltGr ~ is dead breve e.g. ă ğ
AltGr / is dead dot below e.g. ạ ḅ
AltGr ? is dead dot above or dotless lowercase 'i' e.g. ḃ ċ İ ı
On a US keyboard, some of those keycap symbols will differ.
This is all typed in rxvt-unicode - that also allows me to type the
[ISO 1475] codes directly, e.g. ctrl-alt-2-5-9 for ə [ latin schwa ]
and ctrl-alt-2-1-9 for ș [ latin s with comma below ].
The dead keys, and things in my Xmodmap, work in other apps such as
libreoffice.
For some other xorg terminals you may find that much of this does
NOT work - I imagine that gnome, for example, requires you to do
things its own way.
For non-xorg terminals on linux and using kbd, there are various
compose tables which might suit you, and at least one is probably
picked up automatically. If you are using linux and kbd, take a
look at the keymap you are using - Compose might need to be defined,
you can then probably use Compose '"' 'a' for a-umlaut.
Distros using console-tools are different, and I haven't used them
enough to work around all their differences. For other systems I
have no idea.
In my case I have enough trouble remembering some of the correct
dead keys, so I wanted to use similar sequences on the rare occasions
I'm using the console. The compose tables are limited, and the
first match cannot be overwritten later, so I do not use the
standard compose tables. I'll quote a few lines from my own keymap,
to illustrate the principles:
|# right windows key and right menu key both mapped to Compose -
|# my normal keyboards have one or other of these
|keycode 126 = Compose
|keycode 127 = Compose
|
|# for some reason, although vim is using utf-8 encoding (:set enc)
|# it thinks the file is in latin1, which royally screws up the examples
|# : set fenc=utf-8 is needed here
|compose '#' 'a' to U+00E0 # a grave à
|compose '[' 'a' to U+00E4 # a diaeresis ä
HTH, in which case have fun experimenting, and remember to back up
any definitions you edit - breaking a keymap can do surprising
things (I once list the control keys from my on kmap - only noticed
when ^C did nothing to stop a compilation).
ĸen
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce
