[SWLUG] Incorporating accents in emails.

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 05:52:29PM +0100 or thereabouts, Dick Porter wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-09-11 at 11:49, Neil Jones wrote:
> > This question is a simple one but I don't know the answer.
> > How to I type accented letters?
> 
> The easiest way is to use the dead keys on the keyboard. 

I deleted the examples, largely because my editor is apparently
too stupid to understand them by default.

This dead key business rather depends on having a sane UK keyboard
which the computer knows about. But yes, alt-gr is how I do it too.

I note that for some reason Dick has forgotten to mention how to
produce the Euro symbol: it's alt-gr E in most of Europe, but 
alt-gr 4 (where the dollar sign lives too) in Britain.

Does anyone have a list of these alt-gr things somewhere? I am
forever forgetting them all and end up randomly trying things.

There are two other alternative ways to generate the things.
Both are cumbersome, and one is probably anti-social:

The Gnome character picker applet in your panel (or KDE equivalent):
you click on it, hit a likely letter (e for all the accented e's,
a for all the accented a's, l for a pound sign, and so on: it will 
do capitals too and fractions (shift-letter and number keys) too. 
And then you can select a letter and paste it in. This is a pain 
unless you only have one or two characters you want to do.

Or there is always HTML email and É, ö, â and
friends. Which carries the problem that lots of people will just
delete it unread :) 

Telsa