International Keyboard Frenzy

My wife is traveling through Europe, sending us e-mail from Internet cafés along the way. Here's one I received this morning:

thnks for the msgs.  i luv zou and miss zou 9sorrz i hav a bratixlava kezboard0. will trz longer message in a few dazs. 

love, hugs and kisses.

She's actually a pretty good typist, but she was flummoxed by the keyboard on the computer she used in Bratislava, Slovakia, because several of the keys are in different places from where here fingers expected them to be on a U.S.-English keyboard. The interface between fingers and keys is a fragile one in computing. 

Of course, my wife could have tinkered with the Regional Settings control panel (Windows) or International system preference (MacOS) to disregard the hardware keyboard and interpret the keystrokes according to any other supported keyboard layout (like U.S.-English), but machines in Internet cafés are probably not set up to allow that kind of modification without administrative permission.

Thosé of üs whö frequently wríte with çharacterß from othër langüages not natively supported by our hardware need keyboard tricks to do so.

DOS

• Are there any dinosaurs out there who remember how to do this besides me? To generate ü on a U.S.-English keyboard, for example, you had to hold down the left Alt key and enter 129 on the keypad. The left Alt key accessed the ASCII characters above 128.
• I don't think Latin-based operating systems supported non-Roman characters; you had to either buy that version of the OS or get special software to add the functionality. (Who cares? It's ancient history.)

WINDOWS

• U.S.-English users can use the U.S.-International keyboard layout to generate combined Latin characters like ëüöàñçß¿¡. I use it as my default mapping. It takes a bit of getting used to the change in how you use your quotation mark key -" ' - because you hit it before the key you want to accentuate. 
• You can also Insert Symbol in most Windows applications, but this is clunky. 
• For Asian and other non-Latin characters, or to map a different soft keyboard over your hardware keyboard, enable a different input language in the Regional Settings control panel. (This may require installing additional fonts in some exotic languages.)

MAC OS

• Right out of the box, you can use the same keyboard tricks that have been in place since System 7. Option + e tells the OS that you want an accent aigu over the next character, such as e or a; option + u generates the diaeresis or umlaut over the next character, and other option + combinations result in other common accented Roman characters.
• From the International system preference you can display a character palette in the desired language, then select the characters as you need them, or you can impose a software keyboard over your hardware keyboard. 
• There's also full support for Asian and other non-Latin input methods, but again, you may need to install fonts (e.g., for Indic languages) from your original installer discs.

I have no doubt that these functions are elegantly handled in Unix/Linux variants as well, but I have the disadvantage of never spending time on them. Post a comment if you have useful tips on this.

How do you handle multilingual character input in your daily work?