Why cannot LibreOffice get real?

Let’s cut straight to the chase. I want to be able to use common diacriticals in European languages via simple, quick keyboard shortcuts, as I am typing. Acute, grave and circumflex accents, tildas, umlauts and all those things that, in the days that I had Office, were simple to do. I have been looking online for suggestions as to how to do this in LibreOffice, and they might as well be in Chinese for all the use they are. I want a system which works painlessly - sometimes I think I would be better off with quill and parchment.
In sorrow (but also a little bit of anger)
Martin

Character input should be performed using the respective features of operating system. It has nothing to do with application programs.

This comment is a precise example of what I meant when I said that suggestions might as well be in Chinese. And why can’t LibreOffice get this sorted out??? Bah!

字符输入应当使用的操作系统的相应特征来执行。它无关的应用程序。

Install the extension “Compose Special Characters”.

http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/compose-special-characters

It will let “you type two or three characters and use a keyboard shortcut to convert them into a single accented or special character.
You can also compose unicode characters using the 4 character unicode value.
Writer and Calc are currently supported.”

It worked with LibreOffice 5.1.2 on Windows 7.

If you use diacritical marks that much, try setting your keyboard layout to US international on your operating system. This will make it easier for your LibreOffice installation to get real.

Good advise. For Windows users, however, the int’l layout is OK only when they need languages of Western Europe and of no use for Eastern and Southern. Linux is much better in this respect.

I repeat - I do not see why the operating system should have to be invoked> If Office can do this, why cannot LibreOffice? That is my fundamental point.

Because
the OPERATING-SYSTEM is the first thing which is invoked for mapping your keystrokes to something you can see on the screen.
Any modern OS has the capabilities to manage different keyboard-layouts and switch easily between them.

@hattohoax: please don’t expect us to read your mind. You are not specifying exactly how is it that it works under Word. When I used Word a while back the “quick shortcuts” I used were Alt+nnn and those were provided by Windows, not Office. If Word has some other way of providing this itself, please tell us explicitly what that mechanism is so we can map it to a similar functionality, if such functionality exists.