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

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

> Thanks.  I did:
>
> 	* quail/cyrillic.el: Add quotation marks, paragraph symbol, angled
> 	brackets, number symbol, and accented aeio to cyrillic-translit.
>
> The quotation marks are both ‚‘ and „“ (plus «» which are also common).
> Let me know if I've missed anything.

I am disappointed by this change.  It has several drawbacks:

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

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

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

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

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

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/