address@hidden: Re: X Input Methods support is not very convenient]

[Eli Zaretskii]

Forwarded to this list with Steve's permission.

The original issue was the fact that Emacs 21.1 needs the locale set
correctly (via $LANG or $LC_ALL) for the non-ASCII X keysyms to be
decoded as users expect.

If someone wants to work on this, I think it would be a welcome
addition.

------- Start of forwarded message -------
To: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
Subject: Re: X Input Methods support is not very convenient
Organization: University of Tsukuba
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
Date: 03 Nov 2001 22:47:14 +0900
In-Reply-To: <address@hidden>
Sender: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>

Sorry for the mail, but I haven't got around to working around the
news breakage here.  Feel free to post to the newsgroup if you want
(and edit out the brazen advertisement for XEmacs, that's FYI to show
the level of feasibility, and not relevant to the thread).

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

    Eli> AFAIK, it's an X issue, not an Emacs issue: the X libraries
    Eli> linked into the client program (Emacs) translate the keysyms
    Eli> received from the X server into something encoded in the
    Eli> client's locale.  So Emacs's application level has no choice
    Eli> but to use the locale-dependent coding-system to decode the
    Eli> non-ASCII input events.  That's why LANG should be set to the
    Eli> correct locale for this to work.

It's not very hard, but tedious to code and debug.  The basic thing is
simply set locale manually using setlocale, call XOpenIM, set locale
back to wherever it was, and there you are with a handle to the IM you
want, and you can then hook XOpenIC into the LEIM registry system.
This will probably be available on an experimental basis in XEmacs 22.0.

You still have the problem that XFilterEvent is globally active IIRC,
so you have to keep your hands off Shift-SPACE.  The user can work
around this by binding the XIM's activation key to something less easy
to hit by mistake.

- -- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
              Don't ask how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.
------- End of forwarded message -------