X keyboards & international characters

[David A. Bandel]

On Sat, 31 May 2003 09:29:47 -0600
Collins Richey <erichey2 at attbi.com> wrote:

> OK, we had the "Easy umlauts" series, but nothing seems to work for
> me, so can we do some X basics?  I've spent days googling and man'ing
> without coming up with any answers.  As usual with most things linux
> or X, RTFM is great if you know which FM in advance <grin>.
> 
> 1. Where do you find a description about the exact meaning of "PC101",
> "PC104", "pickakeyboard layout", etc. ?  My keyboard is one of the
> usual current generation with left and right CTL and ALT keys and the
> three extra WinCruft keys.  What is the number?

pc104 will work fine

> 
> 2. Where do you find the meaning of cryptic keycode descriptors like
> "AltGr-" ?

On a Spanish keyboard, that's the right alt key (not sure on others) 

as for meaning??? don?t understand the question.

On a Spanish keyboard, you have not two, but often 3 symbols on a key. 
the upper is shift, the lower left is normal, the lower right is using
the <AltGr> key.

> 
> 3. Where do you find the meaning of  "Compose Key" , "Meta Key" ,
> "Mode n", etc. ?

On the old DEC5000 keyboards I used years ago (1990-1995) w/ Ultrix, we
had a key called "Compose" that allowed us to construct ? by holding the
compose key and selecting ~ then n.  The Meta key should be your left
Windoze key and mode is most likely the right one (but I haven?t ever
had reason to use these so don?t quote me on this).

> 
> 4.  My X config has the following layout, but I can't find any
> combination of keys that will generate umlauts and other international
> character.  What am I missing?
> 
> Section "InputDevice"
>         Identifier  "Keyboard0"
>         Driver      "keyboard"
>         Option      "XkbRules" "xfree86"
>         Option      "XkbModel" "pc104"
>         Option      "XkbLayout" "us_intl"
> EndSection
> 
> 5.  Font selection is OK.  Emails display the appropriate umlauts,
> etc.

Some apps don?t honor the X stuff.  Most notably, OpenOffice for me (but
I use OpenBox as my wm, not KDE).  They also don't work for me in an
xterm.  They work in an xterm running vi, but give me weird things like
\xf1 for ?.  However, if I save the file and cat it, I see ?.  Works
fine in Sylpheed, tknotepad, amsn, some others.  So mutt should display,
but may or may not write them.  Hasn?t been a big issue for me to this
point, so I haven?t researched further.

The use of these extended ASCII characters seems (128-255) to be _very_
application dependent.

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
-- 
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
		Nemesis Racing Team motto
GPG key autoresponder:  mailto:david_key at pananix.com
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