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Re: Keyboard problems - no "dead keys" - in Linux version of Mathematica

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg60016] Re: Keyboard problems - no "dead keys" - in Linux version of Mathematica
  • From: albert <awnl at arcor.de>
  • Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 23:14:29 -0400 (EDT)
  • References: <derog9$s9g$1@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Hi,
 
>  I can't use accent characters like 'à', 'á', 'é'. Normally I insert them
>  using '´' and 'a' (the ´ can be seen as a "dead key"). But in Mathematica
>  when I type this sequence I get only "´a". In other programs (Firefox,
>  OpenOffice, etc...) the keyboard works right, therefore it is not a X
>  server configuration problem.

My guess is that mathematica does this on purpose, it seems reasonable if
you bear in mind that it is an editor for a programming language and you
will use the ' and ` characters standing for themselves a lot more than for
producing 'à', 'á', 'é' . Whether it is good habit for an application to
override these kind of user configurations is another question...

>  Any hints?

anyway, there are 'shortcuts' for all the characters (and many more) that
are enclosed by Escape-Characters. Try the following key-sequences in the
FrontEnd:

Escape  a  `  Escape
Escape  a  '  Escape
Escape  e  ^  Escape
Escape  o  "  Escape
Escape  g  Escape
Esacpe d s R Escape
Escape  b  u  Escape
Escape  < - Escape
...

this is not perfectly convenient when writing long texts in e.g. french or
german, but one can get used to it. _And_ it makes available special
characters of a wide wide range. I think there is a listing of these
shortcuts somewhere in the Help-Browser, but it is usually more convenient
to open the palette 'Complete Characters'. If you put the mouse-pointer
above any of the characters you will see the corresponding
keyboard-shortcut in the status-bar.

hope that helps,

Albert


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