Need help for a Walloon keyboard layout

Jean-François Colson jf at colson.eu
Mon Oct 11 05:13:20 PDT 2010


Hello everybody!

I live in Belgium, in Wallonia. Here, French is the official language,
the language of instruction, the language used by the administration,
but there are also minority languages. I live approximately at the
border between the Walloon speaking area and the Picard speaking one.

In Walloon, the standardised spelling (rifondou walon) makes a great use
of the letter å (a with ring above) and, on belgian keyboards on Linux,
this letter is only available by Shift + Alt Gr + ^ (dead_abovering)
followed by a, which is not very practical for such a frequent letter
(to have an idea of the frequency of this letter, look e. g. at
http://wa.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Aidance). Of course, there's also
the sequence Compose + o + a, but that is not THE best way to do it.
In the Feller spelling of some dialects of Walloon and in Picard, there
is also an e̊ (e with ring above). This letter doesn't exist in Unicode
as a precomposed character and needs to be encoded as an e followed by a
combining ring above (U+003A).

I'd like to make a variation of the Belgian keyboard layout where those
characters (å and e̊) would be on the Alt Gr layer and their uppercase
forme (Å and E̊) on the Shift + Alt Gr.
The problem with e̊ and E̊ is that I'd need two new keysyms (ering and
Ering) and two new lines in the file /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8:
: "e̊"
: "E̊"
Is it possible to add such keysyms?
Who could help me?
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