Entering Those Funny Characters

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This morning, I had a customer who runs Linux ask me about entering umlauts in their email. Seems they’ve been emailing their relatives in Germany and can’t seem to figure out how to add those funny accents to their correspondence. The letter ‘u’ with an umlaut looks like this, ü (or capital Ü), in case you are curious.

Well, as a guy with a funny accent on one of the letters in his last name, I have found a way to do this without having to resort to swapping keyboard maps in and out.

This presumes you are running KDE where there’s a great little program called “kcharselect“; just look in your Utilities menu for “Character Selector”. When the program starts up, you see a table of all 256 available characters for your current locale. Over on the right, there’s a drop down list that you can use to select a font and font size. Over on the left, you can choose a different character set, alphabet, or symbol set, and choose basic of extended sets. Find what you need, click on the character, then click the “To Clipboard” button to copy it. Once done, you can just paste it into whatever you are using to write

Useful and simple.

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