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

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:54:35 +0300 Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org> wrote: 

>> I can do
>> 
>> (insert (compose-chars ?а ?̀))
>> 
>> but if I try the resulting character in quail-define-rules, it's not a
>> valid character read sequence, being two characters.  I also can't
>> specify the `compose-chars' function call or a string there.  How do I
>> specify a combined character in the quail rules?

JL> Maybe something like this should work ("a`" "а̀") ("a'" "а́").

It doesn't, according to the docs and it's the first thing I tried :)

JL> I think we should use ` and ' as the postfix character, like
JL> latin-postfix vs latin-prefix.

OK, I changed things accordingly and will commit to CVS when the problem
above with doing combining characters in Quail is resolved.

>> Can we have `' generate acute accents and ` generate grave?
>> That's a decent compromise since accented letters are rarely needed.

JL> Since ` and ' are more important for accented letters, we should
JL> find an alternative key for ь.

I often see it written as q or u in manually transliterated text.  Maybe
// or /q or /u would work?  The corresponding /? /Q /U would uppercase
it.

>> The goal is convenience for the users, so I hope we don't build a large
>> prefix tree.  Just the limited repertoire here is already hard to
>> remember.

JL> I now noticed that I can't type a pair of double quotes in cyrillic-translit
JL> that I often do.  Maybe this rule should use the slash prefix key /""  -> “ ?

OK, it's more consistent that way.  Let's eliminate all but << and >> as
non-prefixed special characters for consistency (those two are too
convenient IMO).  So we'd have:

/-  -> –
/-- -> —
/.  -> • ("big fat dot")
/.. -> … (or whatever is appropriate for this one)
/1{2,4,8,16,32,64} -> 1/fraction (the slash moves to the beginning)
/c  -> copyright
/tm -> trademark
/rub-> ruble
/kop-> kopek
/lev-> leva (л AFAIK)
/sto-> stotinki (с AFAIK)
/e  -> euro
/ce -> cents
/pa -> §
/`` -> ” (high 9 double quote)
/`  -> ’ (high 9 single quote)
/,  -> ‚ (low 9 single quote)
/,, -> „ (low 9 double quote)
/'  -> ‘ (high 6 single quote)
/'' -> “ (high 6 double quote)
/&  -> §
/ab -> §
/#  -> №
/no -> №
<<  -> «
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