Type German vowels in LibreOffice Writer

I would like to type German vowels (with umlauts) in documents. I have a lenovo ideapad (inexpensive) with Fedora 33 and LibreOffice. I don’t want to buy a new (or additional) keyboard. Anyone know of a “simple” way to insert these characters? Or, at least more simply than copying and pasting, as needed, from a separate text file. I am learning German, and record English - German responses side-by-side, so a keyboard 100% German ist unmöglich.
Danke

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try to write Umlaute like ä as ae and then add an macro, if something like that exists in LibreOffice, to switch ae to ä after the fact, could make it easier to write Umlaute without changing your setup and keep your productivity up.

Ich hoffe das hilft dir weiter. Viel Erfolg!

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Just to be sure:

(To my knowledge) the German keyboard layout doesn’t sacrifice anything you would be able to “simply” type on the international English one.

Sure, you have to learn different short cuts for various symbols but the main stuff is mostly the same.

Except the brackets. Get ready to use AltGr a lot (square and curly bracket need those).

The big four letters you need are Ä, Ö, Ü and ß. Don’t know if there are any “4 key keyboards”.


Thought: Find a programm that lets you set up key combos, then just assign something like Alt + A/O/U/s to be Umlaut or ß

Edit:
Arduino Micro can emulate a keyboard (or mouse). Breadboard, 4x buttons, 4x 1k resistor and some easy code (that is probably online already) and done.

Ja, das hift. Danke.

I’ll consider a different keyboard when I purchase a new laptop. I don’t want to invest anymore in this one.

Thanks to all!

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Why is a German layout impossible? I mean, it has all of the letters of the English alphabet plus the German ones, so it shouldn’t be impossible to use after getting used to it. Hell, I’m typing this on the Bosnian layout (Bosnian laptop & Bosnian person).

In my experience, only the English layouts don’t have those behind Alt Gr. I mean, both of those brackets, the at symbol, eszet, umlaut and accent markers (as well as the tilde in ñ), Bosnian quotation marks (English ones too on the British keyboard layout; „“, “”, and ‘’, not “” and ‘’), arrows (→↓↑←), and many more are behind Alt Gr in the Bosnian layout for example.

What do you mean? The keyboard on both of my laptops (15" & 17") have enough keys to type all four of the characters in the German layout. Are you referring to a hypothetical keyboard with only those four characters?

Edit

Wow, the forum automatically corrects the quotation marks:
image

You know those external num-pads? Imagine those, but with only 4 keys on it.

Oh.

I wonder if a Stream Deck could be set up like that
It would be overkill, but…

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