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Infrablue
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The terminology related to keymaps is a little bit strange but there are a couple of terms worth learning. One is the term symbol. You would probably guess that a symbol is a thing one sees typed on a screen but this is wrong. A symbol is a sequence of one or more key presses which produce a grapheme which is the thing one sees on one's monitor. Because not all symbols produce graphemes they are called dead symbols. For example if you ever chose the U.S. International keyboard layout on Windows machine you would notice that pressing the <quoteright> key (the apostrophe key) by itself produces no graphemes. Instead, if you press one of a number of keys after having pressed quoteright the behaviour of that key is altered. So pressing <quoteright><e> produces not the grapheme e but rather e-acute, é. What happend was that under the U.S. International layout in Windows the symbol associated with the <quoteright> gets changed from apostrophe to dead acute. Note that the symbol to produce apostrophe has not disappeared. It is changed to <quoteright><spacebar>. Many people who need to type international characters do not like the behavior of this U.S. International layout because it is annoying to always have to type <quoteright><spacebar> when one wants to type an apostrophe, or <shift>-<quoteright><spacebar> to type a double quote. Enter Multi-key Fortunately there is a much better way to produce international characters which not only avoids the drawbacks of of the deadkey approach but also extends the possible number of characters much further. This approach creates a new special key called Multi-key which is usually assigned to either the right-Alt key or to the right-Windows key if there is one. Just as the spacebar functions as a special key which combines with other keys so does Multi-key. But Multi-key is even more than this. Multi-key acts more like a special toggle switch. For example to type e-acute using Multi-key one types <rightalt><quoteright><e>. Note that unlike with the shift key one does not have to simultaneously press Multi-key and the consecutive key at the same time. Following is a table of keys with associated symbol names and example graphemes which they produce.
This is not the end however. The applications one uses must
be able to support these graphemes. This Perl statement will
print out a range of special graphemes which is useful to see of the
font in your terminal can handle them: Regarding Locales
Locales are another component in the language/grapheme set
puzzle. One way to reconfigure and/or set the default locale for
your system is to run:
dpkg-reconfigure locales (Make sure you have locales installed. Installing localeconf is a good idea also.) I recommend using en_US.UTF-8. References: "Those foreign diacritical marks ("accents")", http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~jhf/kiss3.htm "Special symbols", http://www.daube.ch/docu/glossary/signs.html |
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