Standard compose sequence for accented letters in X desktop?

Etsushi Kato ek.kato at gmail.com
Mon Sep 4 04:43:42 PDT 2006


Hi,

I'm a member of uim (http://uim.freedesktop.org/) and I've recently got
reports about problem of Compose key sequences in X11's desktop.

#1. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=377808
    (insufficient sequence of GTK+ internal table, actually a bug of
XIM protocol BTW)
#2. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8118 (insufficient sequence
     of X11 compose file)

uim is a multi-lingual input method library, and the latest version of
our bridge
for GTK+2 and Qt3 on X11 desktop use X11's equivalent mechanism of reading
locale dependent X11's Compose file (and user defined ~/.XCompose and/or
$XCOMPOSEFILE) at run-time after getting report #1, so that all X11 Compose
sequence is available even with GTK_IM_MODULE=uim.

But I got the report #2 today and noticed that GTK+'s static stable has extra
key sequences which X11's Compose file for UTF-8 locale doesn't have.   So
there seems a discrepancy between GTK+'s compose key sequence and X11' s
one.  As a side note, Qt3 with immodule patch has its own internal static table
(plugins/src/inputmethods/simple/composetable.cpp) based on X11's
Compose file, so it also has a same discrepancy between GTK+'s one (I'm not
sure about Qt4).

For example,

  * GTK+ lacks "Multi_Key c =" sequence for € which en_US.UTF-8/Compose has.
  * X11's en_US.UTF-8/Compose lacks "Multi_key o slash" for ø which
    gtkimcontextsimple.c has.
  * Qt3 with immodule patch also lacks Multi_key o slash" for ø.
  * ...

Of course I can prepare a uim specific default Compose file with just merging
X11's UTF-8 and GTK+ one, but I think using standard file
(locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose) is better to decrease confusion of users.

So the question is that

1. Is there any standard spec for compose input sequence for X desktop?
2. If it doesn't exist, is there any plan to provide the spec?
3. And if I create the X11 Compose file merging GTK's extra sequences,
 would you incorporate it to xorg?

Cheers,
-- 
Etsushi Kato
ek.kato at gmail.com



More information about the xorg mailing list