I have many friends whose first language is not English. Most are quite relaxed about polglotism: they write to me in their first language, and I reply in mine (English). Sometimes, however, I need to write in their language. I have been too busy learning the other mechanics of Linux to worry about non-English characters.
Changing national keyboard layouts is a surprising hassle, not in software terms but from the user perspective. It is many years since I lived outside Canada and I no longer recall how layouts differ from language to language and from country to country. I spent fruitless hours last year hunting for examples on the Web before I swallowed my pride and hauled out an old Microsoft manual <grin> which I already knew had all the layouts I needed neatly laid out in an appendix. Nor am I willing to give up my ancient but treasured Nothgate keyboards which, being from the USA, have stolidly unilingual keycaps. My locale is en_CA_UTF8. I am looking for the simplest way to enter non-English characters from an English keyboard (e.g.Ã Ã Ã ). In Windows, it was never hard; there are few enough that I usually remembered the Alt+nnn keycode for the 437 and 850 codepages. For longer texts, the WordPerfect (Ctrl-w) function was also dead easy. Rarely, I switched to another keyboard layout and kept the layout diagram propped open in front of me. What I am looking for is something comparable to the old ALt+nnn (where n is the numerical keypad) method. If there is nothing, I will switch keyboard layouts. I now keep that old Microsoft manual close to my, ouch, Linux computer.