(Solved!) Accessing non-standard characters

[Mourningdove]

In another post, the name of a Pardus developer, Serdar Dalgıç, was mentioned. It got me to thinking:

I use the US-standard keyboard. In the event that I have to access a character that isn't in the American alphabet (and there are two of them in the name "Dalgıç"), what's the best way of going about doing that? If I'm in OpenOffice, that's easy enough, but there should be a system-wide way, so I could use accented letters and Unicode characters in, for instance, Firefox or Emacs. I'm sure there is, I just don't know how to find it.

Thanks in advance!

[atolboo]

Alt + F2 and enter:

kcharselect

+ Apply
or make a KDE Menu entry with Command:

kcharselect -caption "%c" %i %m

[Mourningdove]

Cool!

I am hoping for a keystroke-based system, i.e., meta + : + e = ë, meta + ` + e = è. But that KCharSelect utility (which I never would have found on my own) is a good start. I was just scrolling through the DejaVu tables in sheer amazement at all the stuff that's there.

[frisil]

Your keystroke system is an excellent idea! I hope something like this will be used someday...

[Mourningdove]

I found what I was looking for; it was in Pardus all along, but I didn't know where to look.

Tasma | Peripherals | Keyboard Layout | the tab that says Xkb options.

Click on an empty checkbox that says "Enable xkb options". That will allow you to access the list below there. Scroll down about a third of the way, and you'll see "Compose Key Position". Click on the empty checkbox to the left. You'll notice that the seven boxes below "Compose Key Position" also light up; you may want to deselect most of them and concentrate on using one.

I chose the left Windows key (LWinKey). Now, by hitting LWinKey ' e (consecutively, not as a chord), I can produce é. LWinKey and two spaces produces a non-breaking space. LWinKey s s produces the German letter ß.

There is a huge list of these things here.