Krdytkyu

In Brazil, we use ª for feminine ordinal numbers, just like 1st, 2nd, 3rd... in English. So it's a very common need. I just set up the Compose Key, so I can do "Compose Key, o, o" to get the masculine ordinal ° (in fact, this is the degree sign, but they're both similar. The real masculine ordinal faces the same problem as the feminine). But, although this site says I could get the ª with "Compose Key, a, _" (or similar compositions), I'm getting ā or Ā instead of ª.

Is there an easy way to type ª in Ubuntu 16.04 (LibreOffice, gedit, etc)? Please I'm not interested in memorizing/typing complex Unicode sequences.

EDIT

After the answer from Ludenticus, I realized that I can type only

Alt Gr + [ for ª

Alt Gr + ] for º

IF you have Portuguese (Brazil), you'll find it with

[Alt Gr] + [Shift] + [F]

Otherwise, see under the Keyboard Layout Chart

These are the instructions for libreOffice.

SUPER SCRIPT:

Select the text that you want to make superscript or subscript.
Do one of the following:
Choose Format - Character - Position, and then select Superscript or Subscript.
Press Ctrl+Shift+P to make the text superscript, and Ctrl+Shift+B to make the text subscript.

INSERTING SPECIAL CHARACTER:

This function allows you to insert special characters, such as check marks, boxes, and telephone symbols, into your text.

To view a selection of all characters, choose Insert - Special Character.
In the large selection field click the desired character or several characters in succession. The characters are displayed at the bottom of the dialog. When you close the dialog with OK, all displayed characters in the selected font are inserted in the current document.
In any text input field (such as the input fields in the Find & Replace dialog) you can press Shift+Ctrl+S to open the Special Characters dialog.

For Gedit:
See this.

Here's my favourite trick to type any Unicode character, in any context:

1. Google 'Unicode for {the character}'. Make sure you use the exact
   character.


2. Note down the 4 characters after the 'U+'. In this case, ª is 00AA and º is 00BA, but you can skip the leading zeroes.


3. Type Ctrl+Shift+U. You will see the cursor transform into an underscored 'u'.


4. Type the 4 characters and press space.

Voila, your character is entered, and you don't need to mess around with keyboard layouts :)

To keep using Compose Key, a, _ and Compose Key, o, _ key combinations to type ª and º you should create a ~/.XCompose file on your home directory with the following contents:

include "/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose"

<Multi_key> <underscore> <a> : "ª"   ordfeminine # FEMININE ORDINAL INDICATOR 

<Multi_key> <a> <underscore> : "ª"   ordfeminine # FEMININE ORDINAL INDICATOR 

<Multi_key> <underscore> <o> :  "º"   masculine # MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR

<Multi_key> <o> <underscore> :  "º"   masculine # MASCULINE ORDINAL INDICATOR

The reason Compose Key, a, _ gives you the ā character is because that's exactly what is configured on current Xorg X Server Compose Key mappings. Take a look at /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose:

<Multi_key> <underscore> <a>            : "ā"   U0101 # LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH MACRON

It must have been different on the past, and all those websites with keymappings are outdated.

On that same file you'll see that in order to insert a ª you have to press ^, Compose Key, _, a:

<dead_circumflex> <Multi_key> <underscore> <a>  : "ª"   ordfeminine # FEMININE ORDINAL INDICA>

This will only work if your current keyboard layout outputs a silent (aka dead) ^. That's the default on the US intl keyboard variant.