Posts Tagged ‘foreign characters’

I wrote some time ago about how to get Debian to allow you to type characters like é, ç, ü and ß -pretty necessary stuff if you are in the habit of typing non-English music track titles (for example). Apply the technique described there to Ubuntu 9.04, however, and you will wreck your X configuration, with reboots into a strictly command-line environment the norm thereafter!

In fact, life is a lot easier in Ubuntu in this regard, because there is GUI support for enabling the ‘compose key’ that lets you type these sorts of non-English characters. Click System -> Preferences -> Keyboard and then select the Layouts tab. Click the Layout Options button, and you’ll see this sort of thing:

As you can see, simply expand the Compose Key option and then select whatever key combination you want to invoke the ‘compose behaviour’. I’ve gone for the right-ALT key, but you pick whatever suits you.

Immediately you do that (and click Close, twice), you’ll be able to implement foreign language composition. For example, I’ll launch gedit, press-and-hold the right ALT key and type a comma; when I release all those keys and then type the letter ‘c’, I’ll actually see a c-cedilla (ç). Or, if I hold down right ALT+colon (which means right alt+shift+the apostrophe key), let go, and then type the letter ‘a’, I’ll actually see a-umlaut (ä).

And all much easier, thanks to the GUI, than fiddling with xorg.conf scripts!