X Compose Key

[Forester]

Hi,

Has anyone any experience of using the X window compose key mechanism to enter diacriticals (é ä usw), ligatures (æ, ß usw), currency symbols (£, €, ¥ usw) and other special characters (©, ½, ¿) under Knoppix ?

This has always worked nicely with Linux (well, X windows) until now. Is there some Knoppix specifics I should know about ? I'm using Knoppix 6.4.4, MAXI EN edition and, no I don't do anything daft like lang=uk when I start Knoppix.

I get the dead-key effect as expected but no special characters. The best I have got so far is <compose> 1 2 gives 1/2 instead of ½, which I can do without a compose key.

Any suggestions anyone ?

P.S. If you're using the DE edition, you might need to view this posting using UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1.

[utu]

Does this article by Balsa and one he references by Jensen
have anything useful to offer? or, just old hat to you?

http://gwyn.tux.org/~balsa/linux/deadkeys/index.html

[Forester]

or, just old hat to you?

Thank you for the suggestion utu. No I hadn't read the articles. They brought back painful memories of the days before I moved to Linux when my colleagues were using either AZERTY or QUERTZ keyboards as their nationality dictated and I discovered that my typing was no less accurate for setting the keymap to en_US and just not looking.

The articles suggested a couple more things to try but, hélas, they didn't work.

It seems that KK hates UTF-8 and believes German volk world-wide, including the Pennsylvanian cousins and their descendants, are better off without Unicode. Certainly there is no way en_US.UTF-8 works under Knoppix 6 despite it being the Debian 6 default. I suspect this is a consequence of the way internationalisation is (or isn't) built into KK's GNU libc library special mix.

I have tried the only European 'lang' cheatcode with a UTF-8 suffix. Yes, my compose key works if I boot with lang=fi-utf-8. Sadly this isn't terribly useful as my Finnish is limited to «yksi kaksi» and «Älä tapa!» .

I don't believe that UTF-8 is requirement for a compose key so I booted up the old faithful: Knoppix 5 and configured a compose key and sure enough it works. So, alas and alack, the absence of a compose key looks like another Knoppux 6 'feature'.