Comment 31 for bug 531173

This problem has popped up over and over again with almost every Ubuntu release. It largely affects people who deal with a number of languages using the Latin character set, but are used to the US keyboard. I think there may be other variant keyboards for which subscripts would be useful, but I'm not sure. This is a convention adopted in MS-Windows many years ago.

BTW I created the first US-International keyboard layout for MS-Windows in 1987, and it soon needed to be expanded. It's pretty hard to devise a layout of that sort to handle ALL the European languages without making its use very cumbersome - that's why there are 3 or 4 variants other than the standard US keyboard. It's necessary for the user to know which one has been selected. The trick of enabling a popup showing the layout by right-clicking on the icon works, but it takes up screen space, which for example is limited in the first place on a netbook.