minibuffer, input methods

[Martin Steffen <msteffen@ifi.uio.no>]

Hi,

I got  the folling question/problem. It has to do
with the following:

I want to type in characters not supported by my keyboard (to be concrete,
German umlauts) but not only that:

    I want that this is done also in the mini-buffer.



As far as I have read through the ``theory'' of all it, I
have come so far that 

  1) I have installed leim in addition to the
    plain emacs distrition


  2) I can activate some specific input-method, for
    instance

       M-x set-input-method ->> german-prefix

  3) Since point 2) does not lead to the fact that
     that method is _inherited_ into the mini-buffer
     (and since  enable-recursive-minibuffers  is 
     kind of weird and unpractical), I can set

     (setq minibuffer-allow-text-properties t)

    so that for instance when I do a ``text search''
    I can use this input method also when being
    prompted for the search string.


--

So far so good, now the problem starts :-) I have written
some home-brew emacs-lisps functions, which prompt
the user for some string, using for instance

    (read-string "word: " word));  

Now, in the minibuffer, which is opened by read-string, 


     the input method is not inherited


Now, how can I have that?


I'm grateful for any hints, not only for in relation with the
last question (what's wrong with read-string?) but maybe
I'm in the complete wrong direction anyway?



For instance, I remember in the good old days, there had been
the possiblity to type in  umlauts with

    C-x 8 " u

or analogously. 

I can still type this, but it has not the wanted effect.  I see that the
"key" C-x 8 is bound to "iso-transl-ctl-x-8-map" but it doesn't do what I
expect. 

Or maybe german-prefix is a wrong choice?


Or maybe a trick could be, to set the input-method globally
for all of emacs, maybe then it gets inherited by all
minibuffers, also for read-string.

Anyway, cheers, Martin