Maybe this will be a final report on this issue. Most importantly, since my last post I've been in contact with the author of xwingreek - a Russian fellow who programs in Java and Python who also has an interest in polytonic Greek (Greek with diacritical marks) input. He's been a great help. Xwingreek is actually a bit deprecated. He's written new keyboard switching programs that integrate into OpenOffice.org and M$Word: these allow switching between up to 3 keyboard maps/fonts. He refers to the programs as "Thessalonic" and "PyUNO" (the latter being the one written in Python). I did not succeed in finding either in the Debian repositories I have or in the OOo user interface - despite the fact that he thinks PyUNO is already incorprated into Debian's OOo release. But that's not too important to me since I'm taking the other approach I mentioned earlier (editing XF86Config-4 to allow for keyboard map/font switching for X apps). He's also helped me out with this. He's pointed out to me that there is an additional line possible in the keyboard stanza of XF86Config-4 (this refers to 4.3.0something and may not apply to earlier releases): the "XkbVariant" line. In order to get the phonetic Russian and polytonic layouts (or at least a semblance of polytonic) I want, I've added the "XkbVariant" line with ",phonetic,polytonic" following. That has gotten me most of the way to where I need to be in entering unicode input into Xapps. It also works in a console if you have the right fonts installed. As an additional detail, I should mention that I think you must have a unicode locale specified in your system for this to work. In my case, I've set locale to en_US.UTF-8 (how to set that varies by distribution: dpkg-reconfigure locales is how Debian does it). I'll provide the relevant section of my XF86Config-4 for those interested:
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Generic Keyboard" Driver "keyboard" Option "CoreKeyboard" Option "XkbRules" "xfree86" Option "XkbModel" "pc104" Option "XkbLayout" "us,ru,el" Option "XkbVariant" ",phonetic,polytonic" Option "XKbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll" EndSection Note the "grp_led:scroll" segment too, which causes the scroll lock LED on the keyboard to light up when I'm in one of the alternate keyboard/font mappings. In summary, I've written this in the hope it may help someone else wanting to do this under Linux. Having researched and written it up, I can't say I feel much sense of accomplishment. The reason there is a need for such a description as I've written is because Linux is lacking in certain user-friendliness features that a certain, non-geekish segment of the population needs. The real need is for programmers to fill that gap by writing programs that will do this sort of thing: already the Russian fellow I've mentioned above is doing this and I've heard of others. Thus, my little research/how to project here could likely be itself obsoleted pretty shortly. James - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
