Monday 12 March 2007

Getting International and Accented Characters in Kubuntu/Linux

I've been practicing my French again. One of my local friends grew up in Québec virtually all his life, and one of my local friends is studying French in Québec for a year. When I chat to them, I like to type the French words as they're meant to be written, which includes the accents.

Anyway, I had fun finding where to switch my keyboard so I could use the layout. In Windows, you do it by switching to an American English International Keyboard layout (Control Panel -> Regional and Language Settings, I believe... not in Control Panel -> Keyboard like you'd expect).

I found where to change it. There are lots of options. In addition to the language settings, there are variants in the language settings (dvorak, international...)

In Kubuntu with KDE, I found it in:
System Settings -> Regional & Accessibility -> Keyboard Layout
For reference:
Ubuntu U.S. International Characters Chart
I'm a Canadian with a normal American keyboard (Microsoft RT2300). I've added several keyboard layouts in the list as I want to mess around to see which one I'm the most comfortable with. I seem to be using U.S. English layout with the variant "international".

You can set up other options by using the tabs in the top (Switching Options Tab with "Show indicator for single layout" checked gives you the list in your taskbar so you can easily switch back and forth between keyboard layouts.

The only difference I notice from Windows is the cedilla. The comma key does NOT give the cedilla. You have to use the RIGHT ALT key, and then type comma. This gives you "ç"

2 comments:

Pro said...

Hi,

An easy way for entering letters like à and é or è, or perhaps ñ and the € is to use the U.S. intl keyboard:

[url=http://postimg.org/image/v07v6kfnn/][img]http://s5.postimg.org/v07v6kfnn/USinternational.jpg[/img][/url]

Pro said...

An easy way to typr è and ä and ñ or even € is to use this layout:

http://postimg.org/image/v07v6kfnn/