I can never recollect the dead key combinations for accented characters. So I spent the afternoon with Perplexity AI prompting it to create a simple virtual keyboard Gramplet. It is tested with 5.2 but should work with older and newer versions without tweaking.
You can use it with a touch screen to clipboard a string. It doesn’t have anything sophisticated… like repositioning the insertion point, pasting back into the text box, interacting with the keyboard (like Ctrl, Alt, Caps Lock or the other keys), keybindings or highlighting of the currently selected layout. (The gramplet is only 160 lines long.)
After adding a string to the textbox, click the Copy button to clipboard and paste into wherever it is needed. Click the Clear button to start again.
There are no configuration options. Nor does it save which layout is selected. It always defaults to the “Special” layout.
I have not used any of the keyboards that support special characters. So if there is a standard layout, I’m not aware of it. But it should be easy enough to change.
The gramplet is available as a manual download and install from my GitHub repository:
https://github.com/emyoulation/addons-source/tree/maintenance/gramps52/VirtualKeyboard