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Writing in a Foreign Alphabet

If however, you are going to write a text in Spanish, French, Turkish, or some alphabet that makes regular use of diacritical marks, you are better off changing the input method. The easiest way to do this is either C-x RETURN C-\ or M-x set-input-method. Hit tab to see the full gamut of input methods available to you, from Georgian to Tibetan to Dvorak and beyond. In these cases, emacs will assume you're using a keyboard where certain keys correspond to certain particular characters in that alphabet.7 Assuming you just want to type some French or Turkish, something like latin1-postfix or latin1-prefix should do the trick. In both cases, you create a character like à by using the ` and a keys on your keyboard: for latin-1-prefix you type the symbol before the letter and in latin-1-postfix you type the symbol after the letter. This is equivalent to the ``dead keys'' keyboard layouts provided by the keyboard settings in most Linux desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE).

If you are going to switch between two input methods (i.e. keyboard layouts), use C-x RETURN C-\ the first time to make the first switch. Subsequently, toggle back and forth between the two layouts by using C-\.


next up previous contents
Next: Inserting Special Characters Up: Foreign Languages and Foreign Previous: Occasional Diacriticals   Contents
Randall Wood 2011-03-31