GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 127296
GOK compose keylabels bad with XFree 4.3
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
This seems to depend on the version of XFree being used...GOK is OK with 4.2 but 4.3 is very broken indeed. GOK is calling XkbTranslateKeysym, which in older XFree returns a valid UTF-8 string for the keycap. But in 4.3 it returns an ASCII string _describing_ the keysym, so instead for instance of '£' it returns "sterling", instead of the correct symbol for e with an accent acute, it returns "eacute", etc. This is very bad indeed for GOK's XKB-generated keyboards.
Created attachment 21584 [details] screenshot showing (correct) GOK keycaps for 'de' keyboard with Xfree 4.2
Is there some discussion going on somewhere about this? I couldn't find anything at http://bugs.xfree86.org/ -- perhaps we should open a bug there.
I have made an enquiry but have heard nothing so far. Some more research is needed on our end probably to get a good handle on this; it requires a development machine running 4.3, which I'm getting set up now. I strongly suspect that what we'll hear is, "the old behavior" (on which we depend) "was incorrect, the new behavior is the fix", in which case we won't be able to make progress and will have to work around this in a most horrific way. i.e. we need to do string-lookup in a table that understands all possible X unicode keysym names. Not pretty at all. - Bill
Bill, I'm assuming this one is yours? ;-)
Created attachment 22214 [details] screenshot showing GOK 'de' keyboard with XF 4.3 (bad labels)
Fixed in CVS; thanks to Marcus Kuhn for the public-domain source file that made the fix easy!