X keyboards & international characters

[Collins Richey]

On Sat, 31 May 2003 11:38:25 -0500
"David A. Bandel" <david at pananix.com> wrote:

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

> > 1. Where do you find a description about the exact meaning of
> > "PC101","PC104", "pickakeyboard layout", etc. ?  
> 
> pc104 will work fine
> 

Yeah, it works fine, but what does it really mean?  What's the real 
difference between PC101, PC104, etc.?  And how can you tell which
you've got?

> > 
> > 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.
> 

The question is, where is there a list of key names with corresponding
definitions?  I can guess that with Alt in the name, it has something to
do with one of the Alt keys, but what is the Gr- portion of the symbolic
name?  You, for example, use <AltGr> but I also see this written as
<AltGr->.

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

In my case, no app seems to recognize any of the methods of generating
international characters that we have discussed thus far.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
gentoo stable - ext3