Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Cesar Crusius <cesar.crusius@gmail.com> Cc: Cesar Crusius 
>> <cesar.crusius@gmail.com>,  jhanschoo@gmail.com, 
>> emacs-devel@gnu.org Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2018 18:37:23 -0700  
>> >>  I'm not sure what you mean by "want the decomposed 
>> >>  characters  
>> >> to appear in the text," but when I am writing polytonic 
>> >> Greek  and type the sequence above, all I want is to see an 
>> >> alpha+macron+acute in front of me.  
>> >  On display or in the buffer?  If on display, then Emacs 
>> > should  already do that, provided that the font you are using 
>> > supports  the composed characters.  That's because by default 
>> > we have the  auto-composition-mode turned on.    I was 
>> > talking about what's in the buffer.  I think that if the 
>> > user types a sequence of characters, Emacs should generally 
>> > put  those characters unaltered in the buffer.  If the user 
>> > wants a  precomposed character, she could always type that 
>> > character's  codepoint using "C-x 8 RET", no?    But maybe I 
>> > don't know enough about the expectations of users  who would 
>> > use greek-polytonic input method, maybe in some use  cases 
>> > such automatic composition in the buffer is expected? 
>>  Maybe we're talking about different things...   (snip) 
> 
> More accurately, input methods normally read ASCII characters 
> and produce non-ASCII characters, whether accented or not.  By 
> contrast, your original text: 
> 
>> For example, the sequence <alpha>+<combining macron>+<combining 
>> acute accent> is not represented by any precomposed character, 
>> but appears frequently in critical editions of 
>> classics. greek-polytonic.el allows for the input of combining 
>> characters themselves, and substitutes such sequences with 
>> their Unicode-canonical precomposed equivalents if they exist;

That's not mine, but the OP's text :)

> led me to believe that your input method takes three non-ASCII 
> characters, alpha combining macron and combining acute accent, 
> and produce from them a single composed character which is their 
> NFC precomposed character.  This is not what an input method 
> should do, IMO. 
> 
> However, I see now that no such NFC composition is being done 
> for non-ASCII input (right?), so I guess I misunderstood; sorry 
> about that.

No need to be sorry about anything -- wonders of written 
communication. I think we're on the same page now.

> (snip) 
> 
>> By the way, I'm all for greek.el supporting polytonic Greek 
>> natively and naturally. I don't remember what the problems 
>> were,  but I gave up on it quickly when trying polytonic 
>> because it  didn't work. 
> 
> I was talking about adding your input method to greek.el.

Not /my/ input method, I'm just encouraging the OP to think about 
making this an improvement to greek.el instead of a separate 
package, as you suggested in your first e-mail :)

Cheers,

-- 
Cesar Crusius