Version 1 of Non-ASCII characters

Arjen Markus (17 september 2002) The purpose of this page is to provide a place for information about typing characters that are not on the plain keyboard. I started it after some lamentation on my part for not being able to properly type "francais" for instance (it still does not work here :-(), later being introduced to the wonders of "xmodmap" and the trouble Keiichi Takahashi was experiencing with wish 8.4.0, when using Japanese input methods.

Methods of typing accented characters in X Window (UNIX, Linux):

First of all, use "xev" to find out what the keycode or keysym is for a key that you do not use under X Window, like the "menu key" on a typical PC keyboard:

   > xev 

   (put the mouse cursor in the window that appears and press the
   selected key)

With the command "xmodmap -e keycode ... = Multi_key" or "xmodmap -e keysym ... = Multi_key", you can make this key into one that combines two consecutive characters into one:

   "U becomes U-umlaut (well, if it works)

The command can be put in a file .Xmodmap or .xmodmaprc in your home directory:

   keycode 101 = Multi_key