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I've made a variant of Colemak which replaces ‘e’ with ‘ɛ’ – Latin letter open e (I have my reasons, but they're not relevant here). I have two problems:

  • Though ‘ɛ́’ and other versions of ‘ɛ’ with diacritics exist, typing AltGrt+ɛ does not produce anything. I imagine that this is because the accented ‘ɛ’ is a composite character, whereas ‘á’ (produced via AltGrt+a) is a single character.
  • I would like AltGrɛ to produce an accented ‘ɛ’. But with the accented ‘ɛ’ being a composite character, I have no way of putting it into an XKB layout file.

My keyboard is based on gb Colemak, which is based on us Colemak. I'm using stable Arch (kernel version 3.15.5-1) with GNOME 3.12.2 and xorg-xkbcomp 1.2.4-2. I currently switch layouts via GNOME (using SuperSpace, which cycles through input methods).

mudri
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  • See also http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/43073/custom-xkb-layout-in-which-one-key-creates-two-unicode-code-points – Mikel Jul 20 '14 at 14:00
  • Out of curiosity, why are you doing this? Apparently Latin open e is usually used in IPA. Is this ever combined with an acute accent in IPA? – Mikel Jul 20 '14 at 14:05
  • I've made a mildly different orthography for Lojban which uses IPA letters (I call it “Loʒban”). The change from ‘e’ to ‘ɛ’ is made because I didn't want that letter to look too similar to ‘ə’ (which replaces ‘y’) or ‘o’. Accents can be used to mark stress in Lojban names. Incidentally, diacritics can be used in the IPA for tones, but the more popular alternative seems to be to use a set of suffixes. – mudri Jul 21 '14 at 13:37

1 Answers1

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Looking at /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

<dead_acute> <Greek_epsilon>        : "έ"   U03AD # GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH TONOS
<dead_acute> <Greek_EPSILON>        : "Έ"   U0388 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON WITH TONOS

I suspect you can just use U03AD and U0388 in your xkb symbols file, something along the lines of

key <AC08> { [      Greek_epsilon,  Greek_EPSILON, U03AD, U0388      ]   };

(AC08 is the scancode for k, which Colemak uses for e. The third item in the list is for AltGr+key, the forth is for AltGr+shift+key.)

Mikel
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  • I forgot to mention: the letter is Latin small letter open e, not Greek epsilon. But adding similar lines to /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose should work, right? – mudri Jul 19 '14 at 19:52
  • Yes, should work. – erik Jul 19 '14 at 23:25
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    Something weird's going on. ack, grep, wc and cat see a different file at en_US.UTF-8/Compose to less, vim, nano and head. The former see a file of thousands of lines (with my lines at the top), whereas the latter just see the two lines I wrote. – mudri Jul 21 '14 at 13:55
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    Wait, no. It just had lots of blank lines at the top! I guess it was a practical joke from the X people. – mudri Jul 21 '14 at 14:00