feasibility of non-roman menu keymaps?

[Daniel Yacob <locales geez org>]

Greetings,

I'm assuming it is somewhere in the gtk+ lib that a string
like "_File" in a .mo file gets converted into the menu item
"File", with "F" underlined, and the "Alt+F" keymapping defined.
If not please direct me to the responsible library.

For non-roman scripts, how big of an untertaking would it be
to change how this works so that a string such as "<x>_M_<y><z>"
gets interpretted to display "<x><y><z>" in the menu, with "<y>"
underlined, and "Alt+M" is the corresponding keymapping.  Of course
"<x>" etc are non roman chars and designed right "M" would be
a logical mapping to <y> (such as phonetic or the first keystroke
used to compose <y>).

What compels me here is that the alternative "<x><y><z> (_M)"
I've found to be visually distracting, eats up gui real estate, and
makes me look at the gui more frequently and for longer moments
to check what the key sequence is.

I am willing to work on implementing this feature, but I'd like to
know firstly if there is some major reason for not going this route
(has it been tried before and failed?) and if the gtk maintainers
would even be willing to accept a patch for it?

thanks,

/Daniel