Comment 16 for bug 531173

Karmic, up through any current updates, uses icons with numeric subscripts indicating variants of the basic keyboards for a language. Eliminating that feature (actually in a redesigned program) is a definite regression.

By the way, I designed the original US-International layout for Windows 2.11 in 1987, for Olivetti and Microsoft. This was redesigned the next year for Windows 3.0, with the advice of a Nokia engineer, to provide Nordic language support. Visually indicating variant keyboard selections has been an issue ever since. Recent XP versions use one icon or other indicator to indicate the base language, and another to show variants, when more than one variant is enabled.

Also XP provides a keyboard switching option something like control-shift+number key to select various layouts, instead of toggling or cycling through the enabled combinations. It's too easy otherwise to enable the wrong keyboard, without the icon showing definitely which layout is being used - this leads to confusion and typos.

There is a KDE keyboard indicator program, which I haven't tried - it apparently has user-configurable icons. I don't know if that covers this situation.