I'm trying to get my head around keyboard and character coding, utf-8
etc., particularly as regards the Linux consoles which I use much of
the time.

I run Fedora Core 2, Emacs 21.3 and Gnus v5.10.6.  The default console
font seems to be latarcyrheb-sun16, and the keyboard map is uk.map.
I'd be grateful if someone can explain to me:

1) Where do the "compose" combinations come from?  "uk.map" includes
   "qwerty-layout" and "linux-with-alt-and-altgr".  "qwerty-layout"
   includes "compose" and "linux-with-alt-and-altgr" includes
   "linux-keys-bare".  But none of these actually includes the key
   combinations.  "compose.inc" just sets "PrintScreen" and
   "Alt-AltGr" to be compose keys.  (Sorry, that's slightly OT, not
   really being a UTF-8 question.  But it would help me to understand
   what's going on.)

2) Although most, perhaps all, of the composed characters seem to
   exist when I do 'showconsolefont', none of them actually shows up
   when I do 'dumpkeys'.  I just get lots of lines such as

   compose '`' 'A' to ''

3) But if I do 'dumpkeys > filex' and then view filex in Emacs, the
   characters do show up.

4) Also in Emacs, if I press, say, PrintScreen then ` then A, an A
   with a grave accent appears (followed by a hyphen) in the
   minibuffer, but not in the buffer I am editing.  How do I get round
   this?

5) I think I read somewhere that a console font can have a maximum of
   512 characters defined.  Is this true or did I dream it?  (Well, I
   get some funny dreams!)

David

-- 

David Sumbler


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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/

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