At Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:03:37 -0700,
Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
> >   One primary case is that when the "multi key" style input is used
> > (the user holds the "multi" key and hit a key to enter the accent),
> > the composition char may not come right after the base char; the user
> > could even move the cursor to a non-accented base char and hit the key
> > sequence to just enter the composition char.
> 
> So you are basically saying that there are input modes where I can 
> position the cursor at an arbitrary position in the text and then type a 
> composition character to modify the character at the input position? 
> Wow. I had no idea ;-) Where is this used?

  Not entirely sure how widely it is used in the world, but the XO
keyboard setting for a country used that style.  I vaguely remember
that somewhat the layout was moved back to the dead-key style input,
but it surely exist.

  Yes, with this, you can also stack many different accent marks on an
arbitrary base character (e.g., you can type "accent-grave-circumflex
b") in XO's Chat program and Write activity and etc quite easily.
With Pango enabled, Etoys can do that.

> I guess that means back to the drawing board, but it'll be interesting 
> to see if the approach works at all for the case in question.

  Right.  It was too easy to type a code point sequence with
composition character where no pre-composed form exists.  A more
flexible renderer is ideal, but it is practical for now for Squeak to
only support pre-composed forms and just display ? for unhandled
cases...

-- Yoshiki