Compose key yields incorrectly accented Greek characters when using Greek keymap

[kgi]

Version info:

Description: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Release: 12.04

I use the compose key extensively; I find the compose system to be by far the fastest and most natural way of entering accented character.

Entering accented Greek characters is currently broken using composition (using unicode character entry works fine, but that's laborious and requires you to have memorised all the codes).

Specifically, Modern Greek only uses the "tonos" (and, rarely the "dialytika") to accent characters. Accents such as the "dasia", "psili", "varia", "oxia", and the "perispomeni" are never used in Modern Greek; they are only used in "Katharevousa" and Ancient Greek.

As such, the default character mapping for the ['] (right single quote) key should certainly be the "TONOS" bearing variants, and never the other variants. It would be OK for the other accents to be available via *other* keys, but not the right single quote, which a Greek-speaking user will always assume to yield the "tonos".

Note that even if the intention had *originally* been to allow the ['] key to be used to access some other type of accent, it's currently entirely inconsistent: for the alpha and epsilon it yields the varia, whereas for the iota it yields the psili, and so forth, which makes the current mapping entirely useless for Greek language entry.

For example:

[Compose + ' + a] appears to yield [U+1F70 GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH VARIA], when it should be yielding [U+03AC GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS]

[Compose + ' + e] appears to yield [U+1F72 GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH VARIA], when it should be yielding [U+03AD GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH TONOS]

[Compose + ' + i] appears to yield [U+1F30 GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PSILI], when it should be yielding [U+03AF GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH TONOS]

... and so forth.

The Greek vowels are alpha, epsilon, eta, iota, omicron, upsilon and omega; they all need to be fixed to yield the "tonos" variety, for both lower and upper case.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[kgi (iacovou)]

Not sure about the choice of gtk+3.0 as the package for this bug, but

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ComposeKey/

says that these keymaps are "hard coded into the program in source file [gtkimcontextsimple.c]", and

    http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gtk%2B/trunk/gtk/gtk-compose-lookaside.txt?view=markup

also indicates that gtk+ (as opposed to, say, the X.org packages) is the culprit here.

[kgi (iacovou)]

Here is the full list of simple single "tonos" combinations. Note that the key for 'upsilon' is in fact the 'y' key (not the 'u' key, which typically maps to theta), and the key for 'omega' is in fact the 'v' key (not the 'w' key, which typically maps to the terminal sigma).

Lowercase letters:

Compose + ' + a => U+03AC GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + e => U+03AD GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + h => U+03AE GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + i => U+03AF GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + o => U+03CC GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + y => U+03CD GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + v => U+03CE GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH TONOS

Uppercase letters:

Compose + ' + A => U+0386 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + E => U+0388 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + H => U+0389 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ETA WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + I => U+038A GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + O => U+038C GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMICRON WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + Y => U+038E GREEK CAPITAL LETTER UPSILON WITH TONOS
Compose + ' + V => U+038F GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA WITH TONOS

[kgi (iacovou)]

I've done some more digging around, and it now looks more likely that the culprit is the mappings in the file:

    /usr/share/X11/locale/el_GR.UTF-8/Compose

which belong to the package "libx11-data".

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.