Re: Issues with keyboard accelerators

[Simos <simos lists googlemail com>]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 8:23 PM, Claude Paroz <claude 2xlibre net> wrote:
> Le lundi 30 mars 2009 à 11:07 +0000, Simos a écrit :
>> 2009/3/30 Jorge González <aloriel gmail com>:
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > I'm having some issues with keyboard accelerators. Recently some users
>> > opened bugs concerning the usage of keyboard accelerators with letters
>> > containing accents (ie.e _í, _á, etc); apparently they do not work,
>> > however I'm quite sure I tried them long ago and they did work. How
>> > are other teams that use accents (and such) dealing with this problem?
>> > Are you avoiding using keyboard accelerators with these letters?
>> > Should I report the bug to gtk?
>>
>> It is indeed a bug. For our case, we (Greek team) try to avoid those
>> characters when setting  accelerators for the reasons below.
>>
>> The source of the problem relates to your keyboard layout, and the
>> fact that it may require dead keys in order to print characters such
>> as áéäẽ, etc.
>> Due to the dead key sequence, it is currently not possible to do things like
>> Alt + <dead_acute> + <a>, the sequence is canceled as soon as
>> Alt+dead_acute is pressed.
>>
>> If however you could get á in your keyboard layout by pressing a
>> single key (that is, no need for dead key), then the accelerator would
>> simply work.
>>
>> Is it a GTK+ bug or a Xorg bug?
>>
>> GTK+ could be modified so that when it sees "_árbol", it would
>> actually register it as if it work "_arbol", so pressing Alt+a would
>> simply work.
>> The downside is that it would not be able to distinguish between áäãâà, etc.
>> Would that be a realistic problem however?
>>
>> Would we want users to have to press Alt+<dead_acute>+a in order to
>> get to the accelerator? With some layouts, you get <dead_acute> when
>> you press AltGr+<somekey>, so the full keyboard sequence is
>> Alt+(AltGr+<somekey>+<a>).
>>
>> I think I have seen a report about this but I cannot find it at gtk+,
>> component: input-methods. It might actually be a report at
>> freedesktop.org, so you might want to have a look there. The sequence
>> Alt+<dead_key>+<char> might actually fail due to the X server cutting
>> the sequence once the deadkey is pressed.
>>
>> Hope this helps,
>
> Yes, this helps :-) It would be cool if this could be at least
> documented in our Wiki.

Thanks.

I added the text at
http://live.gnome.org/SimosXenitellis/KeyboardAcceleratorsAndAccents
I did not see a canonical location on live.gnome.org to put the text.
Where would it be good to move the page to?

Simos