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The standard keyboard has disappointingly few glyphs, a few of the most common punctuation marks, the alphanumeric keys and a few keys such as | and ` which have special meaning to most operating-systems (for example, | is used to direct something called standard output on UNIX and DOS.)
But how to enter characters like "€", "—" and "é"? These, and many others aren't on most U.S. English keyboards but they still can be entered with relative ease.
The character map application is available but is cumbrous to use.
Look at this key-board:
This is a classical UNIX key-board manufactured by Sun Microsystems, in particular note the AltGr and Compose keys which are absent on PC and Mac keyboards. AltGr is a modifier key like Shift, Alt, and Ctrl, some keys on this keyboard had "alternative graphics", when pressing these keys with AltGr held, the alternate glyph would be inputted.
Compose, on the other-hand is a "dead" key, it modifies the behavior of the keyboard. If the "dead" key is pressed, the next key will not be entered (hence the name) and instead will modify the character outputted from the key pressed after that. For example, pressing "compose", "'" (apostrophe) e produces "é".
To enable dead keys under the KDE desktop follow these easy steps.
The compose keys are now mapped to the logo keys on the keyboard, which typically have a picture of an apple or a windows on them.
In most cases the character combinations are intuitive, for instance "Compose", "=" and "C" renders € and creating diacreticials utilities the existing keys with ~ ' ` , etc. These are all case sensitive.
There are a few combinations that are less obvious:
| Compose key with | and | produces |
| ' | a vowel | á é í ó etc |
| ~ | a vowel | ã ẽ etc |
| , | c or C | ç Ç |
| ^ | a vowel | â ê etc |
| o | a y etc | å ẙ |
| ^ | 1 2 3 | ¹ ² ³ |
| 1 2 3 4 | 2 3 4 | ½ ⅔ ¾ etc |
| o | r c s | ® © § |
| s | s | ß |
| a A | e E | æ Æ |
| / | o O | ø Ø |
| = | y c | ¥ € |
| - | L --¹ | £ — |
| pipe character² | c | ¢ |
¹= two dashes
² = | (due to technical restrictions, | cannot be entered in the table, it has a special meaning in PmWiki tables.)
Categories: Hardware, Workstation
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