[PLUG] Changes in Gnome Unicode character input method

[John Jason Jordan]

In a recent discussion on the Gnome e-list it has been brought to my
attention that in Fedora 13/Gnome the input method for Unicode
characters has changed from Ctrl-Shift-u + Unicode value to iBus
something-or-another. The gist of it, as far as I have been able to
determine, is that you will have to use a keyboard layout to type
special characters, although there is an option to continue to use
Ctrl-shift-u +Unicode value for gtk+ apps provided you launch the app
from a special command telling it to use the old way. If your app is
not a gtk+ app you're screwed.

I am hoping someone here can shed some light on this, as it is critical
to me. For several years I have happily typed characters with combining
diacritics for linguistics using Ctrl-shift-u, which delightfully works
system-wide in all applications. 

To get an idea of what I am talking about, look at the character chart
for the International Phonetic Alphabet:

http://weston.ruter.net/projects/ipa-chart/view/

Pay particular attention to the diacritics, e.g., voiceless, voiced,
more rounded, etc. Each of these diacritics can be combined with any of
the regular Latin alphabet plus the ~100 special glyphs in the IPA. For
example if I need to describe a [b] with a breathy voice (as in
Indo-European and many present day languages), I need to type a b
followed by Unicode 324, which inserts the breathy voice diacritic
under the b [b̤]. There are probably a hundred thousand possible
combinations of characters and combining diacritics. Note that there
cannot be special all-in-one glyphs with the combining diacritics as
there are for Spanish, French, German, etc. because there are simply
too many possibilities. No font that I know of contains all the
combinations and, even if such a font existed, finding the single glyph
that combines the character and combining diacritic that you need would
be impossible.

Linux has always been better than Windows for linguistics work because
Ctrl-shift-u works in all apps. In Windows you can do a similar thing
(Unicode value + Alt-x), but it works only in Microsoft Office, not
system wide. If you need to work in QuarkXpress, OpenOffice.org or
WordPerfect, you have to scroll through an "insert character"
dialog box.

If I understand the forthcoming changes correctly, Linux with Gnome
desktop will soon become worse than Windows for linguistics work. There
may be options with KDE or other desktops, but I love Gnome. This is
not happy news.