Followed Didier's advice on copying and editing as described and thought everything was now fixed as when scrolling on boot-up one of last lines was about the dvorak keymap, but when tried to use it wasn't there. Went to settings on hardware/keyboard/layout but not available. Ditto in "locale" settings on language.
Tried reboot, but nothing doing.
Any further suggestions greatly welcomed as taking forever to type in simplest data; other than on command-line which alone does use the dvorak keying.

If you refer to this post, please copy/paste your /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-keyboard-layout.conf in your next post, and also tell us which desktop or windows manager you use.

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Using KDE

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "keyboard-all"
MatchIsKeyboard "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "evdev"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
Option "XkbVariant" "intl"
Option "XkbOptions" "compose:rwin,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
EndSection

To use "old" way to config. keyboards, add following to Server Flags of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:
Option "AllowEmptyInput" "false"
Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"
Option "AutoEnableDevices" "false"

When I recently substituted "dvorak" for the "XkbVariant" [which obviously didn't stay permanently], there was just "XkbVariant" "" rather than the present
"XkbVariant" "intl" .

Thanks for your attention and help.

Firstly, generally speaking there is no need for /etc/X11/xorg.conf nowadays. Get rid of it. (Just renaming it xorg.conf.bak is enough to have it out of the way).

Secondly, as you use KDE why not make your settings in KDE?

Go to System Configuration => Input Devices (in Hardware) => Keyboard

Select "Configure layout" in the middle of of the screen.

Probably you have only one line in the list below, that now appears. Double Click under Variant in that line, choose English (Dvorak) and click Apply.

My assumption is that when you use KDE the settings you make in KDE override those you make elsewhere.

But I am not a KDE user at all, I just started it to see how the settings work, so that's just an assumption. But that's worth trying.

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Thanks Didier -- worked perfectly.