more keyboard please

[Andrew Kelly]

Hi all,

I'm hoping one of you knows which magic wand to wave, even 
though half an hour of googling has made me rather 
sceptical. Here goes at any rate...

What is the X and/or console equivalent of the good old
DOS [ALT + ASCIIcode] method of inputting characters?

I'm not a big fan of switching keyboard drivers on the fly, or
having to open a character map application to copy and paste the 
occasional í,ñ,ç or whatever into what I'm writing.

I live and work in Germany, and use a standard qwertz keyboard
with appropriate drivers. But we're international in scope and I
constantly have to use several languages in correspondence.

Is there Meta key access to iso8859-1 characters, or do I have to 
completely rebuild my xmodmap?

Help?

Andy