"In most modern desktop environments there is a small applet that allows users to quickly switch between keyboard layouts when they need to type text in more than one language. However, there are situations where this solution is not quite satisfactory. Some writing jobs (that of a translator, for example) require writing text in which words from several languages are intermixed, which would make frequent switches between keyboard layouts necessary. This is a big inconvenience, even when keyboard shortcuts are used to switch between layouts. Another problem is that the logical keyboard layouts used may sometimes not fit the physical keyboard layout very well, resulting in a confusing setup.
"One solution is to use layouts with so called dead keys. This is a way of generating accented characters by first pressing a key which corresponds to the accent (the dead key) and then a letter key (e.g. pressing ~ and then n generates ñ)..."
