New composers for local languages in Togo

[Ran Benita]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 07:29:07PM +0100, Mats Blakstad wrote:
> There do not exist any precomposed character for these once.
> 
> Does it mean that it is impossible to add these composers for XKB keyboards?
> 
> That's really a big pitty!

It is a pity I suppose - Compose is exactly the place where combining
characters are likely to be needed.

I (personally) also find combining characters more natural to use than
dead keys, typing the diacritic after the base character instead of
before it (Dead key: ~ + A -> Ã, Combining character: A + U0303 -> Ã).

For X/libX11 this is most likely will never be supported, but might be
supported in Wayland where there are some extensions to XKB for this
use case.

All of this said, did you try simply omitting the keysym part, leaving
only the string part, and found it insufficient? In the
en_US.UTF-8/Compose file, I see many lines which do not specify a
keysym, only a string. And from a quick test, xterm and GTK applications
both use the string over the keysym. So maybe that's true for all of the
applications you care about.

> I could of course suggest for unicde to add them as precomposed
> charahcters, but would it not be much more easy if XKB could handle
> combinations too? Then we don't need to create new unicde characters every
> time we want to add a new combinations of tones..

My guess is that precomposed characters are for backward compatibility
only and new ones will not be added.

Ran