Re: [gentoo-user] For everyone missing <ALT>+0128 to type the Euro symbol...

[Holly Bostick <motub@planet.nl>]

Collins Richey wrote:
> On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 13:52:17 +0100, Holly Bostick <motub@planet.nl> wrote:
> 
> [ snips ]
> 
> 
>>The Gentoo Weekly newsletter (06-12-04) has the answer!
>>
>>==================
>>8. Tips and Tricks
>>==================
>>
>>Revival of the Compose Key a.k.a. Multi_Key
>>-------------------------------------------
>>
>>A complete list of available Compose Key characters with
>>their description can be found in the file
>>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/<your_character_enocding>/Compose.
>>
> 
> 
> Thanks for the tip. For some reason, restarting the X server didn't do
> the trick, but a reboot did (shades of Windows <g>).
> 
> Now here's a really dumb question. How does one determine what
> <your_character_encoding> one is using in order to determine which
> Compose combinations are valid?
> 
> 

Well, if you're using a language other than English, you probably 
already know your character encoding. People who need their 
by-default-English-language distro to display Chinese, Japanese, 
Icelandic or Hebrew have dealt with this issue often enough to have 
memorized this kind of data, I would think. Heck, I've memorized it, and 
Dutch is my second language (meaning I *could* just use the English 
defaults and be better off since I understand English way better than I 
do Dutch).

If you're using English, the default is iso-8859-1 (us english), which 
does not contain many characters used in other Latin-based languages 
that have things like accents.

iso-8859-15 is west european languages, which has all the English 
language characters, plus stuff like the circumflex and other accents, 
and umlauts and of course, the Euro symbol, since one needs those 
characters to type effectively in a West European language, whereas you 
don't if you're typing in US English.

But I usually keep track of which number goes with which language by 
checking the kernel; File Systems=>Native Language support is a nice 
list of what languages/character sets all the codepage numbers and 
encoding designations represent.

And naturally, this is not so much an issue if you have a keyboard that 
matches your language-- I would imagine that a Dutch keyboard would 
contain all the accents I might need, and probably the Euro symbol as 
well, and I could just type normally, using the Shift key or the Alt key 
to specify the alternate character displayed on the keyboard, and since 
the keymap knows what's there, it would just be typed, like the $ or the 
~ is on my present keyboard.

My issue is that I'm using a US keyboard, so I really don't have a 
keymap for many of these characters-- there is no umlaut in the us 
keyboard map. When I was using Windows, I could look at the Character 
Map applet and find a keycombo (that's the reference to <ALT>+0128) that 
would type the character that the combo was associated with. So I only 
had to use the charmap applet once, to find out the combo; after that, I 
could just use the combo to type the character in most apps. Under 
Linux, the charmap applets tell me how to write the character in HTML, 
but not in gedit; I have to open the charmap every time, change the font 
to the font I'm using in the application, find the character, and copy 
and paste it into my document. This tip changes all that.

But honestly, if one doesn't deal much with locales, and character 
encoding is a new term, because one rarely or never needs to type 
characters in a language not supported by one's keyboard, then this is 
not really that valuable a tip.

But if you do, I at least found it pretty hot.

I'm going to reboot now, and then send a mail to this list with nothing 
but Euro symbols... ;-)

Holly

Oh, all right, not really. I'm sure a text file in Kedit will be good 
enough to satisfy me :-) .

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