Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:30:05 +0000 (UTC) From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Compose key and xterm vs. UTF-8 Message-ID: <hnmftt$sb0$1@lorvorc.mips.inka.de> References: <hnh9td$ph3$1@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>
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Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> wrote: > Short: > ------ > Why do compose key sequences fail to work in a UTF-8 xterm? And the short answer is: They work--if you know the right sequences. The compose key handling presumably comes out of some X11 library; xterm is just the recipient. The actual compose table used depends on the locale encoding. There is an index at $PREFIX/lib/X11/locale/compose.dir and you can find the tables in $PREFIX/lib/X11/locale/*/Compose. It turns out that the UTF-8 table is _quite_ extensive (6676 lines) and all the common characters I was looking for are in fact there. So why didn't I find them? Order matters. The ISO8859-* compose tables list two-character sequences in both orders. The UTF-8 table allows only one order. For the last twenty years I've been used to entering, say, <a><apostrophe> to input an 'a' with an acute accent, but the UTF-8 compose table only accepts <apostrophe><a>. Oh well. On a side note: GTK+2 comes with its own compose tables and the sequences I'm used to work fine in GTK applications like Firefox. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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