Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!bloom-beacon!CLOUSO.CRIM.CA!justin
From: justin@CLOUSO.CRIM.CA (Justin Bur)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: compose character and dead keys
Message-ID: <8907041910.AA00642@clouso.crim.ca>
Date: 4 Jul 89 19:10:52 GMT
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 35

Is anything planned to implement DEC LK201-style compose
character in the toolkit?  And is there a recommended way
of implementing dead keys (what DEC calls two-stroke
compose sequences)?

Out of necessity, I hacked xterm to stop stripping the
high bit of 8-bit characters and implemented compose
character, using the comments around the XComposeStatus
structure as a guide.  But my implementation is useful
only for ISO 8859-1 - the compose sequences would make
no sense for another character set.  Now I need to
support a keyboard with dead keys.  The only model I
have to go on is the file in the HP server source that
initializes the keycode to keysym mapping: HP introduced
new keysyms for dead keys, and presumably treats them
appropriately in their version of Xlib.

I know DECwindows DECterm does both two- and three-
stroke compose sequences, but of course I have no
DECwindows sources.

It would be nice to handle dead keys in the server (using
xmodmap to declare a keysym dead: a sort of special
modifier, just as lock is currently treated specially by
the servers).  But it looks as if I have to do it in Xlib
and then relink everything (sigh).

Any ideas or directives?

Justin Bur
CRIM, Montreal

(Please reply to me and I will summarize to the list, or
at least cc me on replies to the list, since I cannot
currently receive it reliably or rapidly.)