Typing accents
 

Hi I am new to Linux
I am using Lubuntu And I would like to type accents and I have not been able to find out how to use them. It was easy in Windows.

Is there any easy way to type them in Linux?

Windows was using non-standard ASCII

Try using UTF8 characters via Character Map
Latin style will give most Western characters.
àáâãäåæèéêë

There are much better methods - one would be using LaTeX.

The usual option is to go to keyboard settings, and install the US-intl keyboard with dead keys. I don't have a LXDE desktop at hand now so I cannot exactly tell how to do this. If you are in a different reagion and you keyboard is non-US, try do find a keyboard layout which is yours, but does "dead keys".

jlinkels

Sorry I don't understand, where do I find the character map?

Thanks, I use a UK keyboard. How do I find the keyboard layout I have only been using Lubuntu for a few weeks and am still trying to find my way around it.

Sorry - I should have called it gucharmap

Thanks, I have just found Character Map. It has all the accents, but not the fractions that I used to use in Windows.

Without using any accented keys I was able to type into Google: lubuntu keyboard layout
Which produced a few thousands of hits, including this one:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/7882...-lubuntu-15-10
However, it seems that English UK with dead keys does not exist. Only English US, but that swaps a lot of keys like #, $, pounds etc.

jlinkels

I tend to use compose key to type such as ø, ö, å, ç and the like, there's an explanation of how to get it working here. I don't know exactly which characters are available and their shortcuts but I've found the ones I wanted for French, German and Norwegian and they're usually easy to guess (there's also a link to a Wikipedia page in the page linked to above which shows them, I believe).

Compose is usually the answer. Your distro should have a keyboard configuration tool that enables you to designate a compose key: the Windows menu key (is that the name for the thing to the left of the right control?) is a good choice.
Then you have things like
Compose ^ e for ê
Compose 1 2 for ½
Compose + - for ±
The list is endless and can even be configured. I have
Compose l h for ɬ
if you can see it!

As well as gnucharmap for the occasional very exotic things, you also have "Insert - Special character" in Writer.

Thanks I found that pressing ALT GR and 4 gives € with 5 gives ½ and 6 gives ¾

I use all of these but still can't work out how to use French accents, which is what I need, apart from using character map which is rather long winded.
I suppose an easier way will be to use character map type all the accents and add them to the top of the document and then cut and paste the one I need at the time, that would be quicker than going to the character map for each letter.

Or, you could read my post and follow the link. In my case the "compose key" is pressing left-shift then the Alt Gr key then the two characters, as noted in the above post it's a fairly easy thing to do.

Hi David_S,

You need to define a second keyboard configuration in xorg and then just configure the LXDE keyboard switching applet. Here in Montreal, the US and Canadian French keyboards are ubiquitous and I am constantly switching between them depending on the language I am using at the time. For example :

- I am writing this line in English using the US English keyboard

- Pour cette ligne, j'ai changé la configuration de mon clavier à français canadien

... and I've switched back again to English US here.

If this is what you need to do, it is extremely common - I use LXDE with Arch and it's a simple setup I do on all of my computers.

Let me know if you need more details.

Cheers.

OK thanks, I think I have got it now.

Thanks for all your replies, very grateful.

David

Hi there!

Why do you want to use accents? Are you writing in another language such as French or Spanish?

If so, you might simply use a keyboard configuration which corresponds to the other language. It is easy to switch from one keyboard layout to another in Ubuntu/Linux.

I speak several languages, and for English and French I use a French keyboard layout (azerty), as the French keyboard layout has all of the characters necessary for English. However, when I write in Spanish, I use a spanish layout because (Spanish qwzerty), otherwise, it is very difficult to type in accents manually, for example, for the following characters: ñ, á, é, í, ó, ú.

It took me a while to familiarize myself with the Spanish keyboard layout, but, through time I got used to switching from one to another. Strange thing, now, when I type in Spanish, my fingers naturally fall onto the right keys ("q" and "a" are reversed, "m' is not in the same place, etc.).

If you are really interested in languages, contrary to Windows, on Linux, you can change the language of your OS (menus, notices, etc.) to any language you want, ditto when installing applications (e.g., OpenOffice in Spanish), as well as the usual dictionaries, grammar and spellchecks, etc.