Compose button
The Compose key ( English compose , composed) is a special dead key on a computer keyboard , the following key presses are grouped by their pressing to a not in a keyboard layout to produce existing character. It is mainly found on Unix operating systems.
The result character usually results from a relatively intuitive superimposition of the original symbols or letters.
A keyboard symbol for the Compose key is standardized in ISO / IEC 9995 -7 as symbol 15 “Compose Character” , and in DIN ISO 7000 “Graphic symbols on devices” as symbol ISO-7000-2021. This character is contained in Unicode from version 3.0 in the block Various technical characters as U + 2384 composition symbol (⎄).
| Button 1 | Button 2 | Result | |
|---|---|---|---|
| " | a | Ä | Umlaut / Trema |
| ^ | a | â | Letter with circumflex |
| a | e | æ | ligature |
| , | c | ç | Accented Letter ( Cedilla ) |
| s | s | ß | Eszett |
| S. | S. | ẞ | Big Eszett |
| t | H | þ | Thorn |
| < | < | « | Quotation marks (guillemets) |
| > | > | » | Quotation marks (guillemets) |
| + | - | ± | Plus-minus signs |
| > | ' | ' | typographically correct apostrophe |
| = | e | € | the euro sign |
The key combinations can vary depending on the implementation and language setting. Under X.Org , the abbreviations can be looked up and modified in a subdirectory specified in the file /usr/share/X11/locale/locale.dir for the corresponding locale . The file, which contains all possible compose sequences, can often be found under /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose . In most distributions, contrary to the obvious assumption, this file is used for all UTF-8 locales, such as de_DE.UTF-8 .
Only a few keyboards, mostly for computers from certain manufacturers (such as Sun Microsystems ), have a separate Compose key. Under many Linux distributions , it is simulated using a combination of the Shift key and Alt Gr ; the right Windows key is also often used for this. If you use your own xmodmap , the Compose key can be triggered with the help of the “Multi_key” value .
For users of other operating systems, there is sometimes the option of emulating the Compose key using software . For Windows, for example, there is an open source program called AllChars that allows this within the framework of the active character set table and the selected character set ; the portable Windows driver of the Neo keyboard layout enables the input of all unixoid composite sequences.
Web links
- Partial list of Compose sequences in Linux (English)
- Create key sequences for the ISO Latin-1 character set in the Sun Solaris User Guide, 1998 edition, from p. 493 (PDF; 2.3 MB)
- Project overview for AllChars at SourceForge - a Compose key emulator for Windows