Typing Extended Characters

[Hubris2]

I'm trying to learn the Swedish language, and am running into a little issue. I am able to see all characters without an issue, however I'm not able to type the 3 extra vowels present in Swedish (åäö), that aren't present in English (and aren't on my English keyboard).

Many moons ago under Windows, I could use the alt- with a 3 character sequence on the numpad to enter those (alt-132 was one) and it would yield the character. Under linux this does not seem to happen...whether in a browser window, a local editor window, etc.

I have discovered that SCIM is an editor designed to help produce characters for other languages...however it only seems to support languages with a completely different characterset - Swedish is not one of the options.

How can I type the uppercase and lowercase versions of these 3 letters?

Thanks,

[barzam]

I'd say the easiest thing would be to install a Swedish keyboard layoyut and just press the corresponding key on your English keyboard for å/ä/ö. It's very easy to switch between keyboard layouts and I believe it is possible to use a keyboard shortcut for it (not at home at the moment so I can't check it for you).

Good luck with learning Swedish, if you need any help feel free to ask as I am native speaker with solid knowledge.

[Zorael]

To answer your question about special characters.

Don't know where I found the information, but I have a note on my office wall:
press and hold down Shift and Ctrl together
type in u, followed by the four-character unicode value for the character
release Shift and Ctrl

Here's a fraction (00bd) to show it in action: ½

Doesn't work in Open Office, which has its own 'insert symbol'

hth

[Hubris2]

Ä ö - egad it works! It takes 7 characters to type each, but using the following it appears to work as Zorael suggested. Hold Shift and Control, type U, then :

00C4 Ä 00E4 ä A diaeresis
00C5 Å 00E5 å A ring above
00D6 Ö 00F6 ö O diaeresis

Barzam - thx for your suggestion too...but unless switching the keyboard mappings can somehow be mapped to a single key, it's probably faster to just produce the character manually.

[barzam]

Well, å is beside p and öä are beside l on the Swedish keyboard and the rest of the letters are positioned the same way so it's not that hard to get used to it. When I studied Icelandic I found it very helpful to switch the layout for the special characters.