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Dr. Parthasarathy S [drpartha at gmail.com]
I do send and receive mails frequently in French. I use Thunderbird, or Google mail web interface.
How do I add diacritical marks (accent marks) in the text ?
Can someone guide me please ? I find both scim and ibus clumsy. I was thinking of something simpler like a plugin for gedit or nedit where we can just go ahead and type. Since French has very few characters with accent marks and only about a handful of accent marks, I guess it would be much easier that way. Or is there an easier way ? I remember, long ago, when I was a student, I used to escape and type the Hex value of the ASCII code of these characters.
partha
PS: Why do people become so lazy as they grow up ? ;-)
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. S. Parthasarathy | mailto:drpartha at gmail.com Algologic Research & Solutions | 78 Sancharpuri Colony | Bowenpally P.O | Phone: + 91 - 40 - 2775 1650 Secunderabad 500 011 - INDIA | WWW-URL: http://algolog.tripod.com/nupartha.htm GPG Public key :: http://algolog.tripod.com/publikey.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 09:46:12AM +0530, Dr. Parthasarathy S wrote:
> I do send and receive mails frequently in French. I use > Thunderbird, or Google mail web interface. > > How do I add diacritical marks (accent marks) in the text ?
No personal experience with it, but - try the Zombie Keys add-on for Firefox. It's supposed to be designed for exactly that reason.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2335/
> PS: Why do people become so lazy as they grow up ? ;-)
The word is "efficient". At least that's the story I tell myself. 
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Dr. Parthasarathy S [drpartha at gmail.com]
Thank you. It worked.
"Le caf? fran?ais est tr?s bon a cause de son go?t. A No?l tout le monde boit du caf? noir."
I have 2 more questions ::
How do I invoke "zombie keys" from within Thunderbird ?
Is there any such trick for extending gedit or nedit ?
Thanks,
partha
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. S. Parthasarathy | mailto:drpartha at gmail.com Algologic Research & Solutions | 78 Sancharpuri Colony | Bowenpally P.O | Phone: + 91 - 40 - 2775 1650 Secunderabad 500 011 - INDIA | WWW-URL: http://algolog.tripod.com/nupartha.htm GPG Public key :: http://algolog.tripod.com/publikey.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]
On 16 November 2010 05:12, Ben Okopnik <ben at linuxgazette.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 09:46:12AM +0530, Dr. Parthasarathy S wrote: >> ?I do send and receive mails frequently in French. ?I use >> Thunderbird, or Google mail web interface. >> >> How do I add diacritical marks (accent marks) in the text ? > > No personal experience with it, but - try the Zombie Keys add-on for > Firefox. It's supposed to be designed for exactly that reason. > > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2335/ >
There's also the diacritic restoration tool: http://accentuate.us/
The backend of it is available here,
https://sourceforge.net/projects/lingala/ - if you want to do some
offline restoration. It supports over 100 languages, including French
(and the author is a friend of mine
>> PS: Why do people become so lazy as they grow up ? ;-) > > The word is "efficient". At least that's the story I tell myself.
-- <Leftmost> jimregan, that's because deep inside you, you are evil. <Leftmost> Also not-so-deep inside you.
Jimmy O'Regan [joregan at gmail.com]
[Odd. 'Reply to List' is usually the default on tag...]
On 16 November 2010 11:23, Jimmy O'Regan <joregan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16 November 2010 08:15, Dr. Parthasarathy S <drpartha at gmail.com> wrote: >> Thank you. It worked. >> >> "Le caf? fran?ais est tr?s bon a cause de son go?t. A No?l tout le monde >> boit du caf? noir." >> >> I have 2 more questions :: >> >> How do I invoke "zombie keys" from within Thunderbird ? >> >> Is there any such trick for extending gedit or nedit ? > > You could just set one key to be the compose key (I use caps lock), > which allows you to enter accented characters as sequences - > compose+'a = ?, etc. >
-- <Leftmost> jimregan, that's because deep inside you, you are evil. <Leftmost> Also not-so-deep inside you.
afsilva at gmail.com [(afsilva at gmail.com)]
On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 11:16 PM, Dr. Parthasarathy S <drpartha at gmail.com>wrote:
> I do send and receive mails frequently in French. I use > Thunderbird, or Google mail web interface. > > How do I add diacritical marks (accent marks) in the text ? > > >I am from Brazil, and whenever I write in Portuguese, I try to put accents on my writing. The easiest way I've done in GNOME is:
System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layouts -> and then adding the keyboard layout I prefer, sometimes I use USA Internaltional, sometimes I just use the pt_BR.
Once you add the extra language layout a language icon will show up on your GNOME bar, where you can change the layout of the keyboard.
AS
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Karl-Heinz Herrmann [kh1 at khherrmann.de]
Hi,
On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 09:46:12 +0530 "Dr. Parthasarathy S" <drpartha at gmail.com> wrote:
> How do I add diacritical marks (accent marks) in the text ?
plain X supports this with the definition of "dead-keys". For example german keyboard layouts (de) contain by default dead-tilde and dead-acut (or similar).
Dead means -- if you press '`~ the first time nothing at all happens. If you press aeonAEO... etc next you will get the accented letter. If you press space or the same accent again you get the tilde pr apostrophe as itself.
I personally hate this in everyday use (~ beeing a shortcut for /home/user) and there is a nother way. You can declare one of the useless windows-keys close by the space key to be a "compose-key". No it is possible to press compose and accent together then the letter the accent is supposed to be on.
The way I activated the copmose key is in kde, settings, regional, advanced -- lokk for copmose key. However, this is a xkbd extension as basically an X feature as well. I just don'n know ho to activate it directly in X.
Depending on how often you need the accents -- compose is an awkward key press more -- you might want to try the one or the other version.
Hope this helps,
K.-H.
Thomas Adam [thomas at xteddy.org]
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 08:42:27PM +0100, Karl-Heinz Herrmann wrote:
> The way I activated the copmose key is in kde, settings, regional, > advanced -- lokk for copmose key. However, this is a xkbd extension as > basically an X feature as well. I just don'n know ho to activate it > directly in X.
You would need to use XmbLookupString() to do the translation directly, which in itself has a large number of pre-requisites. It's not simple.
-- Thomas Adam
--
"Deep in my heart I wish I was wrong. But deep in my heart I know I am
not." -- Morrissey ("Girl Least Likely To" -- off of Viva Hate.)
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 07:59:49PM +0000, Thomas Adam wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 08:42:27PM +0100, Karl-Heinz Herrmann wrote: > > The way I activated the copmose key is in kde, settings, regional, > > advanced -- lokk for copmose key. However, this is a xkbd extension as > > basically an X feature as well. I just don'n know ho to activate it > > directly in X.
As I recall, it used to be just a setting in the XF86Config file - something like "compose:rwin", which would map it to your right Windows menu key. A little searching turns up the following:
The compose key is known as "Multi_key" in the X Window System, and must be interpreted by the client program (typically Xlib), not the server. In XFree86 and X.Org Server, many keyboard layouts have a variant that maps Multi_key to some key, usually (on PC keyboards) to either of the Windows keys (most often the Menu key, since "Start" is already used to open the start menu), or sometimes Shift + AltGr^[1] or Shift + Right-Ctrl. It can also be specified in XkbOptions (for example, "compose:rwin"). Multi_key can also be assigned with the xmodmap(1) utility. -- via the Wikipedia entry for "Compose key"
That entry also shows the common mappings for it, and has a link to setting up the compose key in X (http://x.co/KLXR).
> You would need to use XmbLookupString() to do the translation directly, > which in itself has a large number of pre-requisites. It's not simple.
The above possibly offers an easier way.
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 01:45:24PM +0530, Dr. Parthasarathy S wrote:
> Thank you. It worked. > > "Le caf? fran?ais est tr?s bon a cause de son go?t. A No?l tout le monde > boit du caf? noir." > > I have 2 more questions :: > > How do I invoke "zombie keys" from within Thunderbird ?
As I'd mentioned, I have no personal experience with it, but it
mentions enabling these keys in the "Mozilla applications" - which at
least implies that it should work in Thunderbird. Maybe it's time to
head for the add-on's home page and explore those docs.
> Is there any such trick for extending gedit or nedit ?
I use Vim, where it's just a matter of hitting 'Ctrl-K' and entering the two-character digraph - most of which are intelligently mapped. E.g., for Russian, the first character of the digraph is usually '=' followed by the equivalent English letter. For French, "?" is "e'", and "?" is "e`", and so on. These can always be reviewed with ':dig'.
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *