FC3 i18n question

David Curry dsccable at comcast.net
Sat Apr 9 19:48:07 UTC 2005


Pete wrote:

>I have had the identical wish. I write in French and
>German, live in a bilingual country, and my name
>contains an ü, so you can see that this issue has
>concerned me since I got my Apple II+ clone back in
>1981. Fortunately, I bought myself a German keyboard
>with all 105 keys, instead of those stunted keyboards
>they sell in North America that are missing a whole
>slew of keys, like ° (what, we don't have degrees
>here?) and all the rest. Why don't they just make one
>standard universal keyboard for everyone? 
>
That would be some keyboard!  Wonder how many different alphabets, 
logograms, and syllabaries there are?

>Say, a
>keyboard that is designed for use with UTF-8, supports
>all (!) of the keys, and has the letters arranged
>alphabetically for the 99% of people who use computers
>who are finger pickers. It would sure be a lot better,
>I'd say. I dread the day it breaks down. I'll have to
>get a friend in Germany to send me a new one. Or maybe
>I could get my hands on a French-Canadian one, if it
>has all the accents, unlauts, etc.
>
>
>Under KDE, in the control centre,
>Peripherals/Regional/Keyboard/Xkb, you could set the
>right menu key to become the compose key. This will
>only work in KDE, and I have it set, just for those
>stubborn applications that refuse to recognize my
>German (latin1) default layout. But the following is
>what you need...
>  
>
Quite a significant difference between KDE and other desktops such as 
Gnome, XFCE, etc.

>Go into the KDE menu, scan down to system settings,
>select keyboard, and at the very bottom, you will find
>a setting called U.S. International. This ought to do
>what you want. It makes an entry into the
>/etc/sysconfig/keyboard file, which you should have a
>look at, so that you can change it manually, if things
>ever should go awry down the road. If there are any
>keys, like the £ symbol, which gets moved to
>somewhare that you are not accustomed (I am assuming
>you are in GB), you can always use a program, I can't
>remember which, but it could be xmodmap. With the
>program I am thinking of, you can either set character
>mappings globally, or just for a specific user, by
>creating a ~/.xmodmap file. I don't like this latter
>solution much, because it means you have to load the
>wrong keymap and then tweak it with mappings to get it
>right. I like to have it right from the start, but it
>might be your only option.
>
>Way back, I wrote myself a custom keymap, but once I
>got the German keyboard, I threw it away. Quelle
>folie!  Also, it seems that the font server has
>changed and I can't quite figure out how to make a
>custom keymap anymore. They used to be gzipped files
>that were just huge tables, starting with a keysym and
>a bunch of entries after each, the first for plain,
>the second for shifted, the third for control, the
>fourth for alt, the fifth for shifted control, then
>shifted alt, then control alt and so on. This was very
>handy and one could have every possible key right on
>the keyboard at all times. There is a program, xed, or
>something, that tells you which code a key is sending
>and you have to map this code to the character. It was
>gruelling work, but the result was a thing of beauty.
>
>In brief, the US Int'l should do what you want.
>
>  
>
Thanks for the edu info, Pete.  Quite interesting!




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