accented Spanish characters in Linux

[Didier Casse]

Hi everybody,
If you have a US English Keyboard and you want to typeset
those accented Spanish Characters on your amsn or Licq, how do you do
that?

I tried to follow this example here:
http://www.samiam.org/typing.spanish.characters.html

but it doesn't work! Is there anyone who knows a bulletproof technique
that would allow me to write accented Spanish characters in RH9 Linux?
Thanks... any help would be most appreciated ;-)

With kind regards,

Didier

---
PhD student

Singapore Synchrotron Light Source (SSLS)
5 Research Link,
Singapore 117603

Email: slsbdfc at nus dot edu dot sg \or\
didierbe at sps dot nus dot edu dot sg
Website: http://ssls.nus.edu.sg

[Peter B. West]

Didier,

I'm using the following options in /etc/X11/XF86Config on my US keyboard
system:

Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "en_US"
Option "XkbOptions" "compose:menu"

Everythings else is standard issue, except that I have manually fixed
the abominable Redhat Delete and Backspace key setup, restoring truth in
advertising. I.e., Delete produces DEL and Backspace produces BS. How
bizarre!

These are on my UK keyboard Latitude:

Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "gb"
Option "XkbOptions" "compose:menu"

In X, these work; in the VTs, the Compose function is hosed. Someday
I'll stumble across the explanation of why Reshat has chosen to fsck
this completely.

Anyway, to get back to X11 -

My configuration came from a reading of
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86.lst, as recomended in section 2.4
of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/README.config. (The READMEs in that directory
are *extremely* useful.) It tells me that

! layout
us U.S. English
en_US U.S. English w/ ISO9995-3
us_intl U.S. English w/ deadkeys

In other words, if I want Compose functionality for European languages,
use the 'en_US' layout. If I want MS-style US-International keyboard
deadkeys, us 'us_intl' as the layout. Preferring Compose to deadkeys, I
have not tried the 'us_intl' layout.

The other useful information in xfree86.lst is

! option
compose:ralt Right Alt is Compose
compose:rwin Right Win-key is Compose
compose:menu Menu is Compose

This is where my
Option "XkbOptions" "compose:menu"
line came from.

So, for me, 'Menu' followed by 'O' followed by "'" (three separate
keystrokes) give me 'Ó', 'Menu' '?' '?' gives me '¿', and 'Menu' '!' '!'
gives me '¡'.

Xfree86, at least, is able to get the keyboard working, and RH has not
managed to completely stuff it up - yet.

Peter

Wed, 5 Nov 2003 14:24:00 +0800 (SGT)
Hi everybody,
If you have a US English Keyboard and you want to typeset
those accented Spanish Characters on your amsn or Licq, how do you do
that?
http://www.samiam.org/typing.spanish.characters.html
but it doesn't work! Is there anyone who knows a bulletproof technique
that would allow me to write accented Spanish characters in RH9 Linux?
Thanks... any help would be most appreciated ;-)

[Kent Borg]

If you have a US English Keyboard and you want to typeset those
accented Spanish Characters on your amsn or Licq, how do you do
that?

I recently asked about the same question. This is the answer I hit
upon: run the command

xmodmap -e "keysym Menu = Multi_key"

Then use the menu key (has a picture of a menu mid-selection) as a
"compose" key. So for an accented "e", press compose+', then press
the "e". Try other combination for other characters. (Including yen
symbol, US cents symbol, etc.) For inverted question mark and
inverted exclamation point compose+? followed by ? or compose-!
followed by !.

I put the above line in my /etc/bashrc file, after the line that reads
"screen)".

Good luck,

-kb, the Kent who still doesn't know how to do a euro symbol.

[Hal Burgiss]

Post by Kent Borg

If you have a US English Keyboard and you want to typeset those
accented Spanish Characters on your amsn or Licq, how do you do
that?

I recently asked about the same question. This is the answer I hit
upon: run the command
xmodmap -e "keysym Menu = Multi_key"

What version of X and RH are we talking about? RH8:

$ xmodmap -e "keysym Menu = Multi_key"
xmodmap: commandline:0: bad keysym target keysym 'Menu', no corresponding keycodes
xmodmap: 1 error encountered, aborting.

Just curious, don't really need the feature, except for an occasional
voila :/

[Kent Borg]

Post by Kent Borg
xmodmap -e "keysym Menu = Multi_key"

I am on RH 9.


-kb, the Kent who didn't much like 8.0, and now he has another reason.

[Rodolfo J. Paiz]

Post by Didier Casse
Hi everybody,
If you have a US English Keyboard and you want to typeset
those accented Spanish Characters on your amsn or Licq, how do you do
that?

The technique that has worked well for me in several recent Red Hat Linux
releases is to use a US ENGLISH keyboard (the standard keyboard US users
have), and tell Red Hat Linux to use the "us-acentos" keyboard layout. On
Red Hat releases that ask, I tell them to "enable dead keys."

The result is that you type the apostrophe and e, and you get a Spanish
accented e. You type the backtick and e, and you get the French e with
"accent grave". You type the apostrophe and the c, you get the French and
Portuguese cedilla. You type the double quote and the o, and you get a
German umlaut. You type the ~ character and then an n, you get a Spanish ñ...

This allows me (so far) to produce every accent I have ever needed, in any
app I have used, for any language. Given these results, I hate the
language-specific keyboards with "AltGr" keys and odd mappings; I always
get notebooks and desktops with US English keyboards and use these settings.