On 2013-01-13, Leslie Turriff <jlturr...@centurytel.net> wrote: > I've been searching the web for information about how to type accented > characters (French) using a US 104-key keyboard. I understand that a compose > key is involved, but everything I've found so far has involved adding > character<=>key mappings using xmodmap, whereas it appears that one does not > need to do that; but there seems to be an assumption that just saying "press > the compose key and..." magic happens.
As others have said, most modern distributions are set up to do this by default. The thing to beware of is that GTK+, the toolkit used by many applications such as Firefox etc., does its own thing with compose processing, rather than relying on the underlying X processing. (Sadly typical of GTK+.) So if you succeed in working out how to change the X mappings (which is not trivial), it won't work with GTK+ applications. Emacs also has its own facility, but it also uses the native X compose mappings before its own. In summary, if your needs are just commonplace accents, it should just work, and in most cases the compose sequences are obvious, and if they're not, they're in the Wikipedia article. -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.