A real nut: OpenOffice and two-keystroke-accents

Message

kikinovak · Post by **kikinovak** » Wed Aug 28, 2002 11:17 pm

Hi,

Posted this to the OpenOffice Mailing List, seems a real nut to crack. Seems like nobody solved this one. Here we go.

***************************

First of all, my apologies to all the people who tried to figure out this
problem about two months ago. I had to let the thread die because I was
without PC for all that time.

I just got a new one and installed Gentoo Linux on it. About everything runs
fine, except I have no french circumflex (â, ê, î, ô, û) or tréma (ë, ï, ü)
accents, e. g. those that require a double keystroke <accent> + <accented
letter>. When I type the accent, I just get nothing. Every other X
application works fine with the accents (KEdit, where I write this thing
on, KWord, Mozilla, Konqueror, Abiword, ...).

I browsed through the archives and also found the thread that I started two
months ago. I read all the messages, and some other also, because it seems
that many people (french, spanish, portuguese, ...) have got the same or a
similar problem. Solutions are numerous, but none worked for me. I'll try
and resume the information that I have, and try to put some order into it.
Maybe a better description of my ignorance is a way of finding out how it
could work.

1) OS

I use Gentoo Linux 1.2, with KDE3. I tried (in that order) Mandrake,
Slackware and Debian before. I have about eight months Linux experience and
am just an average user (I work mainly as a translator).

Important: OpenOffice *had* accents with Mandrake when I chose to do a
French installation. I even briefly reconsidered switching back to Mandrake
just because of this annoying bug. But then, Gentoo is so good in every
other aspect that I quickly gave up the idea.

2) Keymaps I need in my daily work

- german (de) to write german texts: qwertz with ö, ä, ü, ß. These print OK,
as the accents are one-keystroke here.

- swiss french (fr_CH) to write french and english texts (the latter because
the often used apostrope ( ' ) is better reachable (I'm a ten-finger
fast-typer). This is qwertz too, but with é, è, à and ç instead. This is
where I mainly have my accent problem.

- french (fr): I don't really use this, my french students do when they
occasionally use my computer. It's an azerty layout, but with the same
no-accent-problem in OpenOffice.

3) Console keymap

I wonder if this has something to do with the problem. I tried out several
ones, but with no results. In my /etc/rc.conf, I have:

KEYMAP="fr_CH"

I tried out "de" and "de-latin1" (haphazardly), with no result.

4) Charset

Now I only vaguely know what this is and how it affects my system. But two
people on the list suggested I use an iso8859-15 charset. I found the
corresponding line in /etc/rc.conf, and now it goes like this:

CONSOLETRANSLATION="8859-15_to_uni"

5) Console font

I don't know if this could be of some importance. On the german Gentoo site,
they have a tutorial about german locale definition, and they said to
define a certain consolefont to have a euro symbol. Anyway, my /etc/rc.conf
looks like this in that section:

CONSOLEFONT="default8x16"

6) Dead keys

Now I don't know exactly what they are or what they do. I vaguely understand
that they are linked to my problem. I read the help file in OO about
accents several times over, and it makes mention about the importance of
dead keys. But then, the text was so cryptic that I just gave up. I figure
it must be possible to understand a word processor without being Stephen
Hawking;o)

7) /etc/X11/XF86Config

Looks like this:

Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "fr_CH"

REM: I have a Logitech keyboard with some supplemental keys I never use,
like "www", "mail" and "search". Should I maybe try out some other
XkbModel?

eight) setxkbmap

I tried this out. Open OO, open a console, setxkbmap fr_CH, and then de, and
then fr. Everytime it works fine... but without two-keys-accents.

9) locale

I tried to change that too. My default locale (LANG, LC_ALL) is POSIX
(whatever that means). I tried to change it with:

$ export LANG=fr_CH
$ export LC_ALL=fr_CH

Nothing.

I confess I don't understand very well (or rather: I don't have the
slightest idea) what locale does. Maybe there's some additional package I
have to install? I tried to install kde-i18n-fr, and once it's installed, I
have one more option in KDE Control Center: add language. So I add this
language, and then suddenly all my menubars and apps and all are in french
(what I don't want, since the translation is bad, and I'm accustomed to
english in that context: I hate these square french computer-neologisms).

...

Phew.

Now what can a poor boy do?

Open a can of beer, light a cigarette and post this message?

Cheers,

Niki Kovacs

Yama · Post by **Yama** » Mon Sep 23, 2002 3:35 am

At a guess (I haven't tried this):

1. do an 'emerge rsync' to ensure you have the latest ebuild files
2. go to the /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice dir and open the latest ebuild file in a text editor
3. look for the './configure' line in the 'src_compile' section
4. change '--with-lang=ENUS' to '--with-lang=ALL'
5. save the file
6. use 'emerge' to compile that specific ebuild, e.g. 'emerge openoffice-1.0.1-r1.ebuild'

flokno · Post by **flokno** » Sun Feb 09, 2003 4:36 am

did the self-compilation work? i have sort of the same problem here: german text wih english keyboard.

-- flo

urcindalo · Post by **urcindalo** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:34 pm

I got the exact same problem for both openoffice-bin 1.1.3 and StarOffice 7.

I use AMD64 Gentoo, what prevents me from trying to compile openoffice from source, and as a university teacher I'm allowed to use StarOffice 7 for free. Both are really unsuable, unless this issue could be solved.

Any idea?

urcindalo · Post by **urcindalo** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 5:52 pm

Suddenly, without knowing exactly why, it is just working, at least in StarOffice 7 (I ummerged openoffice-bin-1.1.3).

I changed my /etc/locales.build some time ago, by adding the last three lines in this file:

Code: Select all

$ cat /etc/locales.build
# This file names the list of locales to be built when glibc is installed.
# The format is <locale>/<charmap>, where <locale> is a locale from the
# /usr/share/i18n/locales directory, and <charmap> is name of one of the files
# in /usr/share/i18n/charmaps/. All blank lines and lines starting with # are
# ignored. Here is an example:
# en_US/ISO-8859-1

en_US/ISO-8859-1
en_US.UTF-8/UTF-8
en_IE@euro/ISO-8859-15

es_ES/ISO-8859-1
es_ES@euro/ISO-8859-15
es_ES.UTF-8/UTF-8
es_ES@euro.UTF-8/UTF-8
es_ES.UTF-8@euro

Maybe any of them is not a valid one, but I don't care. I also perform a daily update of both system and world. Among other things, some key KDE and system packages have been updated over these two weeks.

The thing is that today, when I opened a Microshit Word document in StarOffice to print it, I noticed that all deadkeys were available. What a relief!!

I also updated my Gentoo AMD64 profile from 2004.3 to 2005.0 time ago, although I can't remember if this was before or after posting my previous help request in this thread.

Hope this info is useful for someone. I'm also glad to help anyone showing my conf files. Speaking of which, I almost forget I want to show the end of my /etc/profile, where I define my locale:

Code: Select all

$ cat /etc/profile
# /etc/profile:
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/profile,v 1.23 2003/04/29 21:23:18 azarah Exp $

if [ -e "/etc/profile.env" ]
then
        . /etc/profile.env
fi

# 077 would be more secure, but 022 is generally quite realistic
umask 022

if [ `/usr/bin/whoami` = 'root' ]
then
        # Do not set PS1 for dumb terminals
        if [ "$TERM" != 'dumb'  ] && [ -n "$BASH" ]
        then
                export PS1='\[\033[01;31m\]\h \[\033[01;34m\]\W \$ \[\033[00m\]'
        fi
        export PATH="/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:${ROOTPATH}"
else
        # Do not set PS1 for dumb terminals
        if [ "$TERM" != 'dumb'  ] && [ -n "$BASH" ]
        then
                export PS1='\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h \[\033[01;34m\]\W \$ \[\033[00m\]'
        fi
        export PATH="/bin:/usr/bin:${PATH}"
fi
unset ROOTPATH

if [ -z "$INPUTRC" -a ! -f "$HOME/.inputrc" ]
then
        export INPUTRC="/etc/inputrc"
fi

# Extract the value of EDITOR
[ -z "$EDITOR" ] && EDITOR="`. /etc/rc.conf 2>/dev/null; echo $EDITOR`"
[ -z "$EDITOR" ] && EDITOR="`. /etc/conf.d/basic 2>/dev/null; echo $EDITOR`"
[ -z "$EDITOR" ] && EDITOR="/bin/nano"
export EDITOR

export LANG="es_ES@euro"
export LC_CTYPE="es_ES@euro"
export LC_NUMERIC="es_ES@euro"
export LC_TIME="es_ES@euro"
export LC_COLLATE="es_ES@euro"
export LC_MONETARY="es_ES@euro"
export LC_MESSAGES="es_ES@euro"
export LC_PAPER="es_ES@euro"
export LC_NAME="es_ES@euro"
export LC_ADDRESS="es_ES@euro"
export LC_TELEPHONE="es_ES@euro"
export LC_MEASUREMENT="es_ES@euro"
export LC_IDENTIFICATION="es_ES@euro"
export LC_ALL="es_ES@euro"
export LINGUAS="es"

jwc · Post by **jwc** » Thu Mar 17, 2005 6:22 pm

Hi, it's just something I vaguely remember, but I think I got this working with a UTF-Locale. I used tostart my ooo with LANG="de_DE.UTF-8". Perhaps this helps,

Joost

pjv · Post by **pjv** » Wed Jul 09, 2008 4:55 pm

I had the same problem once long time ago, can't remember how I solved it: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-32 ... ight-.html
In general you should click through a couple of times, I have a howto somewhere concerning deadkeys that may also be helpful.

EDIT: Oops, failed to see this thread was also very old, just came up on top of a search so I thought it was recent. Oh well, better too many links than too few.