Hello again.
In the Breton language (a Celtic regional language spoken by
approximately 200,000 persons in France), there are a digraph and a
trigraph which, although they are not included in Unicode, are
considered as separate letters. Those letters are CH Ch ch and C’H C’h
c’h. They are felt as separate letters to such a degree that they have
their own place in the alphabetical order: a b ch c’h d e… Some people
even felt it necessary to make a Breton keyboard: the C’HWERTY keyboard
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Bretona-klavaro.jpg).
The fact that they are not available in Unicode causes several problems.
* In the C’HWERTY layout on Linux, the digraph and trigraph had to be
replaced by six PUA characters and an input method such as xim must be
used to get the correct character sequences. Since they are PUA
characters, those substitutions are not installed by default and the
user has to add them him/herself in his/her ~/.XCompose file. I’ve made
a bug report at Freedesktop.org to ask 6 new keysyms, but I don’t know
when I’ll get an answer if I get one at all. If there were Unicode
characters such as LJ Lj lj NJ Nj nj etc. for ch and c’h, such a problem
wouldn’t occur.
* Since those two letters must be encoded in 2 or 3 characters, with a
monospace font, they are twice or 3 times larger than the other letters.
To solve this last problem, would it be possible to make a font in which
c ZWJ h would be displayed as a new glyph?
Jean-François Colson
