Re: Using .XCompose
On Sat 11 Jul 2020 at 08:39:26 (+0000), davidson wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Jul 2020 Ajith R wrote:
> > Thanks for your experiment. The fact that it works atleast in some
> > applications gives hope.
>
> […]
>
> Curious parties (like myself) wishing to understand the orthographic
> peculiarities at issue here, might find the following section of the
> Wikipedia entry on Malayalam script provides brief, helpful
> background:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam_script#Ligatures
Naturally, this page concerns itself mainly with how "letters" are
written to compose words on the page. But there's a short section at
the end about how the "letters" are represented in the computer and,
possibly, how they are typed in in order to achieve that internal
representation.
Again, I can only talk about languages I understand. In English,
there's a convention that fi is printed differently from the
letters f and i. Similarly, ffi, fl and ffl. However, this
modification is performed on output, in accordance with the font
being used. "Difficult" is always typed in and stored with the
letters f f i.
OTOH, although in the early days of computing, the lack of different
characters forced people to use 1/2 to represent a half, there's no
doubt that ½ exists as a character which can be input and stored as
just that: ½. My father would think it odd that computer keyboards
(often/usually) don't have that key, because all the typewriters
and adding machines from his era did.
So it's natural that I should wish to define a sequence of keystrokes
that types ½, and that's what I have. It's CapsLock 1 2. It might not
work absolutely everywhere, but typically they're going to be places
I wouldn't want or need to use it. For example, the getty where I log
in (can't), and anywhere where keys aren't reflected, like
passwords/phrases (wouldn't).
So those examples, fi and ½, illustrate the difference between
modification on output and input in English. I can't judge how the OP
views this, nor whether they are contravening some conventions in
their own computer culture by trying to make their changes. This
doesn't even address how a computer responds to a command line
written in non-latin script.
> The "appropriate geminate glyph" refered to in property (2) above is
> illustrated in this table, in the "ligated" row under the column
> headed "ṅṅa".
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam_script#Common_consonant_ligatures
>
> > I copied your exact sentences to my compose file.
> >
> > In Konsole the command cat ~/.XCompose gives the result:
> >
> > include "%L"
> > <U0D19> : "ങ്ങ" # Ajith's auto-geminate rule, (U0D19) => (U0D19) (U0D4D) (U0D19)
> > <Multi_key> <s> <x> : "✄" # (U2704) white scissors, h/t David Wright
> > <Z> : "ARGA WARGA IN THE DARGA instead of Z"
>
> Do you know what I see in four lines above, representing the content
> of your ~/.XCompose file? I see "non-breaking space" characters
> (two-byte sequences 0xc2a0). I see 8 of them in the last line alone
> (the <Z> rule). Do you know what non-breaking space characters are?
>
> I'm not quite sure how best to describe them, myself.
In TeX, you would type in Mr~Wright, because it's considered that Mr
Wright is not the polite way to print a name in a book. I've never
tested whether modern versions of text will handle Mr Wright directly
as input, because using ~ explicitly has the advantage of making the
modification more apparent. Otherwise, they're indistinguishable from
spaces in text and on the command line, only showing in emacs, where
they're coloured like all "idiosyncratic" whitespace.
> But I will tell you what they *aren't*. They aren't spaces. They
> aren't tabs. And the only thing their presence is going to do --in
> your code and in your configuration files-- is wreak havoc.
Similarly, a search like /Mr Wright will no longer work in less;
you might have to search /Mr.Wright instead, with a wildcard.
> Their name is very ironic. For our purposes,
>
> 1. they aren't spaces, and
> 2. they break EVERYTHING.
>
> Whatever it is you are doing that puts them there, STOP DOING IT.
>
> […]
>
> > So, as Zeenan says, there is something fundamentally wrong in my
> > system. I have to find that and correct it or reinstall everything.
I would attempt to back out of the changes made. Removing/hiding
.XCompose is an obvious first step. The keymap changes might be
trickier: are there changes in /usr/share/X11/kbd/ or have they
only added files in /etc/X11/kbd/? I know knothing about DE menus.
It would appear from others' posts that DEs can change anything
and everything.
> > > firefox-esr issued the following errors, which appear to be explanatory:
> > > (firefox-esr:11619): Gtk-WARNING **: 16:27:05.630: GTK+ supports to output one char only:
I've never tried to do anything about special characters with FF.
They either work (like ½) in both the address and search bars, or
I expect google or whatever to sort it out like typos (cf role
and rôle). But then, I don't write emails in a browser, or anything
like that.
Cheers,
David.
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