Re: Updating gtkimcontextsimple.c (bug #321896)

[Simos Xenitellis <simos lists googlemail com>]

Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> >  Unicode's combining characters are
> >  supposed to be typed after the base letter, while dead keys are typed  before.
> >     
>
> I don't think how you *type* stuff on a keyboard is something Unicode
> attempts to say anything about. What Unicode says about combining
> characters is that in a stream of Unicode code points (like in
> computer memory, or other storage medium, or in a communication
> stream) they combining characters follow the base character.
>   
I think *I* wrote that fragment above.
I was talking in the context of keyboard layouts in xkeyboard-config, 
and how the end-user types in order to get the resulting characters 
(either combining marks or precomposed). This is the existing behaviour, 
when implementing a keyboard layout.
> I don't see any problem in having various software layers handle dead
> keys so that they turn into combining characters which then are placed
> in the generated stream of Unicode code points *after* the base letter
> which they apply to.
>   
I think the design question here is whether to enable any combination of 
combining characters/dead keys (max 4 + 1 base character), or only allow 
those that are used in scripts (we would need to provide appropriate 
tables for this).
This decision would be for the default behaviour of GTK+ (not as a 
special input method module).

I really want to hear a third opinion on this.

Simos
>   
> >  - Users expect their already existing dead keys to act as dead keys,
> >   i.e. be typed before the base letter on which to put the accent.
> >  - Users don't see the technical difference between î and n̂: it's just
> >   letters with circumflex above (be they precomposed or not).  And so
> >   they will very naturally want to just use the existing dead key to
> >   type n̂.
> >     
>
> I fully agree with these points.
>
> --tml
>