Re: Unicode keysym questions

On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 12:26:01AM +0000, Markus Kuhn wrote:

> > while trying to develop a keymap which includes mathematical symbols, I am
> > wondering about the exact status of the "UCS keysyms" 0x01000000 and
> > above... Are these already standardized? Do any X servers except XF86
> > currently use them?
> 
> The X.Org Foundation has given me access to their CVS just last week to
> ammend the X11 protocol specification and to make this convention
> official. I was on a phone conference with them last Monday and they all
> agreed that adding the 0x01000000 convention to the standard would be
> most sensible.
> 
> > And... how exactly should they be interpreted by clients? Should there be
> > any difference between for example "eacute" and "U00E9"?
> 
> You will have to continue to use the existing keysyms if a character has
> one. The +0x01000000 Unicode mapping is exclusively meant for adding any
> new keysyms for which there isn't already an existing code. This is to
> preserve backwards compatibility.
> 
> [...]
>
> None of the values in the range 0x01000000 to 0x01000100 will
> technically be assigned keysyms, as all ISO 8859-1 codes have already
> other code positions assigned. What your client decides to do if you

Thank you for the useful info...

> We can define it now as strictly as we want and need, because the text
> passage that defines that officially will be written over the next few
> weeks.

IMHO your explanations make a reasonable and sufficiently clear definition.

> > I also noticed that the Compose-Files of 4.3.0 in UTF-8 locales use the
> > Uxxxx keysyms even for characters that have old keysyms (all the
> > accented latin-{12...}  chars).
> 
> I would argue that any Uxxxx notation used in compose files will have to
> go through a special unicode2keysym conversion function that uses a
> mapping table. You cannot simply add 0x01000000 to *any* Unicode
> character to get its keysym. 

Do you mean the server should do this conversion while reading compose
files? I would rather expect the compose files to only include valid
keysyms in the above sense...

> If XFree86 doesn't do that conversion
> correctly at the moment, please file this into the xfree86 bugzilla such
> that it will not get lost. 

If filed this as 

http://bugs.xfree86.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278

and assigned it to XKB which is probably wrong... ???


Thanks so far
Alex