Re: quail-define-package and guidance string

[James Thomas <jimjoe@gmx.net>]

Rahguzar wrote:

> Hi,
> I want to write and contribute to Emacs a couple of input methods for
> Urdu. Looking around the already defined ones, it seems like
> `quail-define-package` is the standard way to define these. One of the
> input method uses phonetic transliteration. However Urdu has a bigger
> alphabet than English and standard transliteration is quite lossy, so
> there is a need to pick one of the translations and assign them to a key
> and the others to a different key combination. As a result I want to
> show such confusables in the echo area. It seems like it should be able
> to use GUIDANCE arg of `quail-define-package` but setting it to an alist
> has no effect for me. Specifically let say I have this code,
>
> (quail-define-package
>  "urdu-phonetic" "Urdu" "اردو صوتی"
>  `((?a . "a → ا , A → آ , ax → أ , u → ع"))
>  "Intuitive transliteration keyboard layout for Urdu."
>  nil t t t t nil nil nil nil nil t)
>
> (quail-define-rules
>  ("a" ?ا)
>  ("u" ?ع)
>  ("i" ?ئ)
>  ("A" ?آ)
>  ("ax" ?أ))
>
> Evaluating it defines the `urdu-phonetic` input method and I activate
> and use it to input the characters above. However if I type 'a' the echo
> area shows 'a[x]' i.e. the default behavior if the GUIDANCE arg was 't'
> and the alist I passed to it is just ignored. Am I missing something in
> the doc string? And is what I am trying to do possible?

My guess: It was probably meant that:

   If it is an alist, the element has the form (CHAR . STRING). Each
   character in the current key is searched in the list and the
   corresponding string is shown *in its place*.

I don't think that the program meant to allow you to display arbitrary
strings.

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