Getting accented letters in Foresight Linux.

I had been trying for months to get accented letters (Portuguese language) with the Bra (Brazil) keyboard layout.
Now, I could always get accented letters like ô, ã and í in both Gedit and a terminal but NOT in webpages (like Gmail or forum messages) or in Yakuake (strange this is different from a terminal) where the same characters turn out like ^o, ~a and ´i.
But today I found the answer. You just install group-xorg-fonts-extra and that's it. I can now get all of my accented characters with exactly the same facility as I can on all other OSes.
Actually, Iṽe just discovered while I was writing this that the solution involved invoking SCIM. I only noticed this because a SCIM icon showed up in the panel on the Mac (although I had never actually started SCIM). When I quite SCIM, the accented characters in Bra went with it. They came back, however, once I invoked SCIM again with the command scim.
So it seems the group-xorg-fonts-extra is part of SCIM.
Not sure about this but at least I can get my Portuguese characters when I want them.