[Xorg] Revision of Appendix A of the X11 Protocol Spec: KEYSYM Encoding

Alex Deucher alexdeucher at gmail.com
Mon Aug 16 09:39:23 PDT 2004


On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 17:21:52 +0100, Markus Kuhn
<markus.kuhn at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> I have substantially revised and updated the long neglected KEYSYM
> Encoding specification in Appendix A of the X11 Protocol Standard. The
> result, which I propose for inclusion into the next X.Org release,
> is on
> 
>   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/X11.keysyms.pdf
> 
> The troff source to replace xc/doc/specs/XProtocol/X11.keysyms is on
> 
>   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/X11.keysyms

Please post this as a bug in xorg bugzilla so it can be tracked an
properly integrated:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org

Alex

> 
> Changes in a nutshell:
> 
>   - Added definition of Unicode-mapped keysyms 0x01000100 to 0x0110ffff
> 
>   - Restructuring of text, with separate sections for
> 
>       - Special keysyms
>       - Latin-1 keysyms
>       - Unicode keysyms
>       - Function keysyms
>       - Vendor keysyms
>       - Legacy keysyms
> 
>   - Addition of Unicode cross-reference column to Legacy keysym table
> 
>   - Added some words on long-term depreciation of some of the Legacy
>     keysyms (Currency, Special, etc.).
> 
>   - Addition of the 0xFExx keysyms (Keyboard (XKB) Extention) from
>     <X11/keysymdef.h>, which were missing so far completely from the
>     standard.
> 
>   - Replaced the archaic ISO/ECMA 16/16 notation with more useful
>     contemporary hexadecimal numbers
> 
>   - Updated the character names to latest edition of ISO 8859 (which now uses
>     the ISO 10646 names)
> 
>   - Removed some long obsolete and irrelevant text (e.g. the section sign vs.
>     paragraph sign vs. pilcrow naming discussion), and rephrased other parts
>     to give more modern examples.
> 
>   - Added keysyms
> 
>       0x06ad   Ukrainian_ghe_with_upturn
>       0x06bd   Ukrainian_GHE_WITH_UPTURN
>       0xfe60   dead_belowdot
>       0xfe61   dead_hook
>       0xfe62   dead_horn
> 
>    from Xfree86 <X11/keysymdef.h>.
> 
> Still to do:
> 
>   - Investigate the semantics of the added "Keyboard (XKB) Extention"
>     set.
> 
>     E.g., some of these seem to come from ISO 9995-7, but cross-referencing
>     with that document did not give a flawless match. Any additional
>     information on that topic are highly welcome. Who did add the
>     "Keyboard (XKB) Extention" keysyms, and when. Is there any additional
>     background documentation about the meaning of these keysyms? Are they
>     all actually used and needed?
> 
>   - Look at Microsoft's recent Multimedia/Internet function keys, which are
>     in part already covered in XFree86 vendor extensions, whether/how these
>     should be moved into the X11 standard.
> 
> A matching updated keysymdef.h proposal is on
> 
>   http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/keysymdef.h
> 
> Comments and reviews welcome!
> 
> Markus
> 
> --
> Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain
> 
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