Re: composed characters question and suggestions for quail-cyrillic-*

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:41:45 +0300 Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> wrote: 

JL> 1. It uses the acute accent to put the grave accent above letters,
JL> e.g. ("'a" ?à) ("'o" ?ò).  A correct way to implement this is to use the
JL> acute accent to put the acute accent above letters, and to use the grave
JL> accent to put the grave accent above letters, as all Latin input methods
JL> do, e.g. ("'a" ?á) ("'o" ?ó) ("`a" ?à) ("`o" ?ò).

You are right.  But please note that AFAIK in Cyrillic it's rare to find
acute accents, so the idea was "accent the next letter" and the ' key is
much more convenient on modern keyboards.  For Cyrillic in particular,
it may make sense to use ' as the accent prefix or accept it in addition
to `.  If you still think only ` should be used, I'll commit a patch
immediately.

JL> 2. It uses accented Latin letters à, ò that is inappropriate for
JL> Cyrillic texts.  The only valid way (as I understand according to
JL> Unicode specifications) is to use combining characters.

I think I mentioned this in an earlier post.  Combining characters look
inconsistent and sometimes take up two lines of text in Emacs, so I
thought it would be acceptable to use the accented Latin letters.  If
not, I'm OK with replacing them with the combining versions.  Please
note I'm not an expert on this topic, so I greatly appreciate your
recommendations.

JL> 3. It turns "'" into a prefix key, but it is used to input "ь" according
JL> to the rule ("'" ?ь).

Would it be possible to move ь under the ' prefix?  As I mentioned the '
key is very convenient and ь is not a frequently-needed letter.  It
actually works fine for me as it is (unless I need to type something
like ьо, which is rare), but I see the problem.

JL> 4. «»“„‘‚§№ is too limited set of necessary characters and this set is
JL> not specific to `cyrillic-translit'.  Different styles of quotation
JL> marks are required by typographic rules in other several languages and
JL> scripts besides Cyrillic, and these rules also require using other
JL> symbols like dashes of different lengths, nbsp, 1/2, 1/4, subscripts,
JL> copyright, currency signs, and many more.

In the specific cases I know (I only write in Bulgarian frequently), the
characters I added are most needed.  If you or others want to add more
characters, go ahead or tell me what needs to be added.

JL> So instead of copying the same rules to all input method a better
JL> way is to create a separate common input method with all these
JL> special symbols and to share it with language specific input
JL> methods.

My suggestion was essentially to build a prefix tree for Slavic
languages, since they share enough typographic rules, and to insert it
into every specific input method.  Using a secondary input method works
better so I hope it can happen (if Kenichi Handa's patch is OK).

Thanks again
Ted