Create your own personal keyboard layout

[rostfrei]

I managed to make additional variant of Russian phonetics on Slovenian keyboard. I'm havin problem with dead key on AE11 for Slovenian keyboard it is

key <AE11> { [ any,any, dead_diaeresis, diaeresis ] };

and it actually works if I try it, but character code is not correct.

So AltGr+AE11 produces character 'ë' which have a unicode 'U+00EB'. This is not correct. In Russian variant it should produce 'ё' with unicode 'U+0451'. This may not seem as much of a problem, but if I leave it that way, no Russian spell checker will work correctly.

Where do I explicitly define which character will be generated if I press dead_diaeresis+<some character>?

[simosx]

I managed to make additional variant of Russian phonetics on Slovenian keyboard. I'm havin problem with dead key on AE11 for Slovenian keyboard it is

key <AE11> { [ any,any, dead_diaeresis, diaeresis ] };

and it actually works if I try it, but character code is not correct.

So AltGr+AE11 produces character 'ë' which have a unicode 'U+00EB'. This is not correct. In Russian variant it should produce 'ё' with unicode 'U+0451'. This may not seem as much of a problem, but if I leave it that way, no Russian spell checker will work correctly.

Where do I explicitly define which character will be generated if I press dead_diaeresis+<some character>?

Which ë is ë? This is a common Unicode question for characters that are effectively equivalent. Unicode-compliant software should and is able to consider both of these ë as the same, and uses the simpler for of the latin ë.

To verify whether the russian ë is indeed equivalent to the latin ë, you need to read at http://www.unicode.org/charts/ and find any info on equivalence.

You can of course force the layout to use the russian ë; however, check for equivalence first.

[rostfrei]

I already read http://www.unicode.org/charts/ Latin and Cyrillic code pages and their supplements. I'm fully aware of the equivalent symbols. I don't want equivalence. I want it to be exact. What if I want that "AltGr+dead_key some_key" produces any character for example "Ю"? It is really easy to do that on Win with "Keyboard Layout Creator". I'm toying with

/usr/share/X11/locale/iso8859-2/Compose

and lines

<dead_diaeresis> <E> : "\313" Ediaeresis
<dead_diaeresis> <e> : "\353" ediaeresis

and

/usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose

<dead_diaeresis> <E> : "Ë" Ediaeresis # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS
<Multi_key> <quotedbl> <E> : "Ë" Ediaeresis # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH DIAERESIS

with no luck so far. Do you have any suggestions how can I map any dead key to the character of my choice?

[simosx]

Do you have any suggestions how can I map any dead key to the character of my choice?

Your default keyboard layout settings use the Unicode data when trying to figure out what you get when you type those sequences. So, if Unicode says “equivalence”, you get equivalence.

What you need to do is force Ubuntu to use raw X.Org for input methods. In doing this you will lose the Ctrl+Shift+u+HEX feature.

So,
1. sudo gedit /etc/environment
Add in there "export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim", save and restart.
2. Now you can change stuff in /usr/share/X11/locale/* and it will work.
3. You can also put your changes in ~/.XCompose so that you keep your modification at your home directory.

[rostfrei]

To be hones I never knew about Ctrl+Shift+u+HEX feature . So those unicode equivalence mappings are fixed in code of the GTK library? I will leave it as is. If the spell checker handles it corectly, everything is ok. I don't want to hasle with xorg.conf file. As a matter of fact there is none on the Ubuntu system so I guess it is automaticaly generated in memory.

Thank you for all your help!

[kallekn]

Thanks, great help! I succeeded in making my own variant of the Swedish Russian phonetic keyboard in no time. Making Russian keyboards of different flavors seems to be the most frequent use for this instruction, and no wonder - there are many modifications around, and once you are used to typing on a special kind of Russian phonetic keyboard, you really don't want to change. Especially if you are still using the other variant on an other computer.

[john1982]

Hi,

there seems to be a lot of expertise here in this thread about all things typing, so I hope I'm right in placing this question here.

I'm studying Arabistics. People who have Arabic as their mother tongue seem to be using "1, 2, 3", etc. for numbers, but in Modern High Arabic, which is what is of scholarly interest, the number symbols initially imported from Hindi are used: (٠, ١, ٢, ٣, ٤, ٥, ٦, ٧, ٨, ٩ - that is 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 if read left-to-right) - now, since these are unlikely to be of use to the average writer, the Arabic keyboard map creates the "normal" number symbols.

How, if at all possible, could I have the normal Arabic keyboard map, but with the above mentioned symbols on the number keys instead?

Thanks a lot!

- John

[henriquemaia]

Hi,

there seems to be a lot of expertise here in this thread about all things typing, so I hope I'm right in placing this question here.

I'm studying Arabistics. People who have Arabic as their mother tongue seem to be using "1, 2, 3", etc. for numbers, but in Modern High Arabic, which is what is of scholarly interest, the number symbols initially imported from Hindi are used: (٠, ١, ٢, ٣, ٤, ٥, ٦, ٧, ٨, ٩ - that is 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 if read left-to-right) - now, since these are unlikely to be of use to the average writer, the Arabic keyboard map creates the "normal" number symbols.

How, if at all possible, could I have the normal Arabic keyboard map, but with the above mentioned symbols on the number keys instead?

Thanks a lot!

- John

I'm not sure If I can help, but you can use any of the methods described in the thread (editing the xkb keyboard map file, create a custom xmodmap, etc) and assign each of the number keys to the corresponding character you want to display. Note that the character won't function as a number and will be just a text character. In any case, since I haven't tried this, I'm not giving you precise information here, just guessing from my experience editing keyboard maps and messing with xmodmap.

[simosx]

Hi,

there seems to be a lot of expertise here in this thread about all things typing, so I hope I'm right in placing this question here.

I'm studying Arabistics. People who have Arabic as their mother tongue seem to be using "1, 2, 3", etc. for numbers, but in Modern High Arabic, which is what is of scholarly interest, the number symbols initially imported from Hindi are used: (٠, ١, ٢, ٣, ٤, ٥, ٦, ٧, ٨, ٩ - that is 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0 if read left-to-right) - now, since these are unlikely to be of use to the average writer, the Arabic keyboard map creates the "normal" number symbols.

How, if at all possible, could I have the normal Arabic keyboard map, but with the above mentioned symbols on the number keys instead?

The Arabic layout is at /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ara

The first layout (at the start) has the text

key <AE01> { [ 1, exclam ] };
key <AE02> { [ 2, at ] };
key <AE03> { [ 3, numbersign ] };
key <AE04> { [ 4, dollar ] };
key <AE05> { [ 5, percent ] };
key <AE06> { [ 6, asciicircum ] };
key <AE07> { [ 7, ampersand ] };
key <AE08> { [ 8, asterisk ] };
key <AE09> { [ 9, parenright ] };
key <AE10> { [ 0, parenleft ] };

What you need to do is replace '1', '2'.. with the Arabic numbers.

Open Character Map (in Accessories) and find the Arabic Unicode block. At the end you get the Arabic numbers, so ۹ is U06F9, etc (see the properties of the character).

Therefore, open the file with

gksudo gucharmap /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/ara

and replace the numbers mentioned above with the correct corresponding Arabic-Indian characters. Here is the example for '9':

key <AE09> { [ 9, parenright ] };

becomes

key <AE09> { [ U06F9, parenright ] };

Save, logout, login again and you are done .

It's possible to add both 012345.. and arabic-indian numbers. You can read other layouts for hints on how to do that.

[roberto.tomas]

Here is the example for '9':

key <AE09> { [ 9, parenright ] };

becomes

key <AE09> { [ U06F9, parenright ] };

Unless the arabic system uses a completely different compat configuration, each key has 4 registers in the symbols file. If you just tack on the arabic in the third register you can then access it with AltGr + # .. like so:

key <AE09> { [ 9, parenright, U06F9 ] };

keypress results should be:

[9] - 9
[shift 9] - )
[altgr 9] - ۹

altgr is the right alt key by default.

edit: of course, you probably want that to map to 1, not 9