KDE4.4 , Compose key & special characters

[fogelfink]

Hi,
I am trying to type German Umlaut letters on an English keyboard using kde 4.4. For some reason I seem unable to figure out how to do that (I have just recently switched to kde, was using gnome before).

I have looked through various threads and the kubuntu wiki (https://wiki.kubuntu.org/ComposeKey), but can't get the compose key to work. In gnome I used to type "AltGr" plus "[" followed by a vowel and thus get my Umlaut - before I fiddled with the system settings this worked in kde, but only in firefox & Open Office (I assume they are gtk apps).
Since it did not work in Kmail, I went to the system settings, set up a ComposeKey (AltGr, but also tried rightWin), but it doesn't change anything for the kde applications. It only means that the old key-combination now stopped working in firefox and OO.
In the system setting of kde 4.4 I can't see the options to enable xkb-options, but I assume the advanced options of the keyboard layout are xkb-options of previous kde releases. I unticked the box 'reset old options', but nothing changed.
Can anyone help me - I type a lot of German text, so using a character map is not an option.

[fogelfink]

i still have no solution for my umlaut problem!
neither third level chooser key, nor compose key seem to do anything in kde applications...

can someone please tell me how to type a german umlaut in Kontact?

[ender4]

Take a look at:

http://userbase.kde.org/ComposeKey

I had the same problem and after going through all of this I got it to work. But it didn't work right away. I'm not entirely sure why.