I made considerable progress with this problem, particularly because I've read "Un unreliable guide to xkb configuration" and got some idea of what's going on. Here are my findings. I wrote: > Can't I just somehow say to the system to ignore what is before the > dot at LC_CTYPE and just accept the UTF-8 result that seems to be > coming from the keyboard driver anyway? No, of course not. The keyboard driver does not send a UTF-8 result to the application, this wouldn't make sense. The keyboard driver, that is, xkb, does not know the LC_CTYPE of the application; it is the application that knows that. So xkb does not know if it should send the character encoded in iso-8859-1, or in utf-8, or in whatever. So what xkb sends to the applications is actually a symbolic code, such as "lower-case greek epsilon" (this is presumably a number defined somewhere in the X libraries). The application then has to convert this into an encoded character, and has to look at its LC_CTYPE in order to decide how to encode it (the application obviously uses some locale-related X library to do all this, and I couldn't find the conversion tables on my system, if you know where they are tell me). For the dead keys, all that xkb sends to the app is the symbolic code for the dead key. For example, if acute is pressed, and then a greek epsilon, then xkb sends to the application the symbolic codes <dead_acute> and then <Greek_epsilon>. xkb does not compose these into "έ"; it is the app's responsibility to do so, and it is locale specific. /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose contains a table that indicates what the sequences containing dead keys produce in locale en_US.UTF-8; likewise for other locales. en_US.UTF-8 is reasonably complete and can do almost everything I want; it can even produce the punctuation symbols that I'm missing (namely guillemots and centered period), thought not with dead keys, as does el_GR.UTF-8, but with multi-key. I don't know what's the multi-key, and I believe that my keyboard doesn't have one, but I think I can map my alt-gr, which I don't use, to multi-key. It is even possible to change the Compose file, and it's fairly easy (but I prefer to not do it because it's a system file; upgrades might revert it, I can only do it in systems where I have root access, etc.) -- Antonios Christofides +30-2661020814 _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list XFree86@xxxxxxxxxxx http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
