How a patch for poppler made me fix a bug in Konsole

In March, Tim Brody sent a patch to the poppler mailing list to make poppler extract accentuated characters of old pdf generated by latex (where the character and the accent where represented as two different glyphs) as a character plus a combining character. After testing the patch i saw it did not work at all, as it was changing the output of pdftotext from
R. L¨wen and B. Polster
o
to
R. Lowen and B. Polster
instead of
R. Löwen and B. Polster

Tim answered with a "WorksForMe" that left us quite puzzled for a while. It took me some time to realize it was actually Konsole's fault as it did not understand combining characters. A bug about that had already been reported by Thiago back in 2005. As i had been bit by that bug I decided to have a go at fixing it and after some days of coding I landed a patch to support Unicode composing characters in Konsole. Unfortunately it was already too late for KDE 4.7 so you'll have to wait until 4.8 to enjoy of this goodness (or use master ;))

P.S: Tim if you are reading this you never answered about the regressions caused by your patch so it was never committed to poppler

How to get Konsole 4.2 to behave?

Dear lazyweb: My Konsole in KDE 4.2 does not like me. Let me explain myself, i like to use vim for quick text editing and i like using the numeric keypad to type numbers, if i use the "Default (XFree 4)" input method, that doesn't work, and pressing any keypad number makes vim go nuts, so i'm using the "Linux Console" input method.

"Linux Console" works correctly when on a local session but if i log into a remote machine using ssh, then suddenly the Home and End keys start outputing ~ characters. And this all does not happen in xterm so it must be a konsole feature, any idea how can i get rid of it?