Emacs 24 and dead keys in Fedora 18

Emacs 24 and dead keys in Fedora 18

[Alexandre Lagüe-Jacques]

Hello all,

After installing Fedora 18, I've come across an odd problem with
Emacs. I have posted this to the fedora-forum as well, but I'm not
sure if the problem is Emacs or Fedora.

I use a Canadian multilingual keyboard. With this keyboard it is
possible to type the characters of every European language based on
the Latin alphabet. Dead keys are very important, as they allow one to
add frequently occurring accent marks to different letters. The
physical layout is here:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/KB_Canadian_Multilingual_Standard_comment-fr.svg

When I first ran Emacs after the installation, the dead keys that I
commonly use in French or German were not working. Emacs would display
an error like '<dead-grave> is undefined' when I pressed the dead key
and the subsquent letter was printed without an accent. The Emacs Wiki
provided a partial solution, namely the addition of the following line
to one's .emacs:
(require 'iso-transl)
(Source: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DeadKeys)

Now I deal a lot with central Europe, and this requires me to type
words in languages like Czech or Polish. Interestingly enough, one can
not enter common Czech or Polish accented characters like ą, ę, ż, or
ž, which require a dead key. This produces an error message like
'<S-dead-caron> is undefined'. What doesn't require a dead key -- 'ł'
or 'Ł' for example, works. A further letter common to Polish produced
with a dead accent, ó or Ó, functions!

This implies that the input of non-ISO-8859-1 characters with dead
keys is somehow broken. Remember, I can type letters in French or
German that require dead keys without a problem. (The ó or Ó is also
used in Spanish I believe.) Furthermore, opening files in Emacs that
contain the problem characters, or copying text containing them into
Emacs, functions normally.

Any ideas?

Re: Emacs 24 and dead keys in Fedora 18

[Stefan Monnier]

> After installing Fedora 18, I've come across an odd problem with
> Emacs. I have posted this to the fedora-forum as well, but I'm not
> sure if the problem is Emacs or Fedora.

Please M-x report-emacs-bug (unlike the idiots at Ubuntu who say things
like "Emacs should be migrated to use the new standard" but never
contact us to let us know).


        Stefan