Comment 12 for bug 628015

Ha. Just got keyboard indicators to display. Rich's comment at:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-settings-daemon/+bug/531173/comments/23
gave the the clue to "add the indicator applet to the panel." In my legacy setup (started with 8.04 on this machine) I was using older indicators in a Notification Area, not the new "Indicator Applet".

**Please warn other longer-term users whose Gnome configs have become idiosyncratic. I had dumped the Indicator Applet months ago because I didn't want to waste space with the email icon; and I COULD drop it because there was still an old Volume applet, and the older Power Manager applet would show up regardless.**

Now the Indicator Applet displays SVG icons stored in ~/.icons/flags. I am using Ian Scott's "Faenza Flags" which are, themselves, rectangles that contain the two-letter codes--or whatever abbreviation you want to put into an SVG (he includes a template).
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Language+Flags+for+Faenza+and+Elementary?content=133726

IMHO this may be the lasting fix to this issue. I agree w/ the shift towards showing keyboard letter indicators rather than flags. I sometimes type in Dari, an Afghan dialect of Farsi. An Iranian flag (default for Persian layout) does not make sense, while a rectangular "flag" showing the letters AF does make sense.

What I would also love to find is a table that correlates Matthew's keyboard-abbreviation list with the keyboard-fullname list. Then I could figure out what to name a "flag" that would be pulled up by the "USA Alternative international (former us_intl)" layout. Is it ua.svg?