Mike FABIAN ✍:
Very few applications can switch between XIM like input methods on the fly. Actually the only one I know is mlterm. With mlterm you can do the switch between @im=kinput2 and @im=local without restarting mlterm.
In OpenOffice you cannot do this.
There are XIM servers which can switch between several input methods, for example on SuSE Linux there are SCIM and uim which can switch on the fly between different input methods.
It looks rather easy to add a input method similar to Compose to SCIM and/or uim. I'll try to do that if I have a bit of free time. That would solve your problem.
Another solution is to use IIIMF instead of XIM. IIIMF is the designated successor of XIM and allows to switch input methods on the fly. This is one of the design features of IIIMF. Because of lack of time I have not yet created IIIMF packages for SuSE Linux though. But I plan to do that soon. I, too, am a skim/scim user and miss being able to use the Compose key. It's been several years since and the scim developer does not understand or does not care.
Would you contribute a patch where Compose works under @im=scim exactly like under @im=local?