User talk:209.183.136.7

compose key software

Your recent edit on "Ordinal indicator" stated that Compose^_a results in "ª", but https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GtkComposeTable states that the sequence is just Compose_a. Could you check if this also works for you, and if it doesn't, are you willing to state what software stack you're testing this on?

Thanks, Solomon Ucko (talk) 01:13, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am running Linux Mint 21.3 with the Cinnamon desktop, under X11.

On this system, the compose key bindings are defined by X11, not by Gnome. Here's the Compose bindings on my system, straight from the X11 repo: <https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/libX11/i18n/compose/en_US.UTF-8.html>

On this system, "Compose _ a" yields ā and "Compose ^ _ a" yields ª. I tried this in gedit and firefox, which are supposed to be GTK apps, and the behaviour is the same, matching the X11 standard, not the Gnome standard.

I do not have access to a Gnome system to test, but I suppose that the behaviour you experience is specific to the Gnome Desktop Environment. It's possible that if you test this in a non-GTK app on your Ubuntu system, you may find that the X11 compose bindings are used there. 209.183.136.7 (talk) 02:41, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Got it, interesting, thanks! Also, the link you provided should be helpful for adding references to this bit of the article.

I got back to my Linux computer, and I somehow have yet another behavior: Compose _ a and Compose a _ both result in ā for me too, but Compose ^ _ and Compose _ ^ result in ¯ for me, with no obvious way to get ª. For me, this seems like it might be controlled by my keyboard layout, which according to xfce4-settings, I have set to "English (intl., with AltGr dead keys)"; /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml indicates that this is internally labeled altgr-intl. I'm running a Franken-Debian with xfce4 version 4.18, libx11-6 version 2:1.8.4-2+deb12u2, and x11-xkb-utils version 7.7+7 according to apt.

Solomon Ucko (talk) 03:06, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Setting your keyboard layout to "English (intl. with AltGr dead keys)" enables a keyboard map that interprets the Right Alt key as AltGr. For example, "AltGr+E" gives é and "AltGr+Shift+E" gives É in this layout. The keyboard layout doesn't affect Compose sequences, which AFAIK are universally available across keyboard layouts, as long as you have defined a Compose key.

On my system, Compose _ ^ is ¯ (macron) like on your system. If Compose ^ _ is also producing macron then you are using a non-standard Compose file I don't know about, see below.

On my system, the Compose bindings are defined by /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose. (Different locales have different Compose files.) This file is part of the libx11-data Ubuntu package, which on my system, according to "apt-cache show libx11-data", is version 2:1.7.5-1ubuntu0.3. It says "This module can be found at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libX11". If I follow this link and navigate to <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11/-/blob/master/nls/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre?ref_type=heads>, then I find a Compose file that is more up to date than mine (last modified July 20, 2024), but with the same Compose sequences defined for the Ordinal symbols. Looking at the history of this file and the masculine ordinal,

in 2003 (X11R6.6) it was _o | o_ | _O | O_. Also, ^_ is macron, like on your system.
in 2004, it changed to the current design: ^_o, and hasn't changed since.

There are many locales, but each locale has a character encoding, and only character encodings that contain the ordinals can have a compose sequence for the ordinals. Nowadays, everybody uses UTF-8, and most of the non-UTF-8 locales are presumably of historical significance only.

Of the non-UTF-8 locales, the ones with ordinals are iso8859-9, iso8859-15, iso8859-1, iso8859-9e. These are historic 8-bit extended ASCII character encodings.

Of the UTF-8 locales, they all use ^_o, except for el_GR.UTF-8 (o_ _o O_ _O) and am_ET.UTF-8 (no ordinals).

I can't account for the behaviour on your system by looking at the X11 source code. 209.183.136.7 (talk) 13:58, 19 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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