A recent post in this Forum by Jonno303 requested assistance with a problem that he or she described as having "difficulty in using dead keys". However, the thread in which that request was posted was shortly thereafter terminated.

This post is to record, for the benefit of Jonno303 and potentially others with similar problems, that the methods I outlined in a thread entitled "Easy Ways to Produce Characters . . ." (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1416999) continue to work, at least up through Gnome 3 as implemented in Ubuntu 12.10 and Linux Mint Nadia.

The essential idea is to select a convenient key on your keyboard to be used as a "Compose Key" with which you can form characters with umlauts, accents, and the like, as well as other special characters: e.g., é, ß, ñ.