Testing the updated IM support in GTK+

March 5, 2008

In Improving input method support in GTK+-based apps, we talked about some work to update the list of compose sequences that GTK+ knows to the latest version that comes from Xorg. From 691 compose sequences, we now support over 5000.

The patch has landed in GTK+ (trunk), and here are instructions for testing.

  1. If you have not used jhbuild before, read the jhbuild instructions and install it.
  2. Add the following to your ~/.jhbuildrc file 
    branches['gtk+'] = None    # Makes sure you build from the trunk of GTK+
  3. Install gtk+ using the command (see the comment of James on this post on how to avoid Step 5 below) 
    jhbuild build gtk+
  4. About 40 minutes later, and about 700MB of space (~600MB for source, ~100MB for installation of files) consumed, you should get a working copy of GTK+ 2.12.
  5. You can use this compiled version of GTK+ by running 
    jhbuild shell

    This should give you a new shell, and whatever you run from here will use our fresh GTK+. Try running “gedit”. You will notice that the theme is different; it uses the default theme due to the special GTK+. This shell has set special environment variables so that program that run will use the fresh GTK+. The rest of the libraries come from our distribution.

  6. If you try to type compose sequences, you will notice no improvement. This is because at the moment jhbuild builds the branch 2.12 of GTK+ and not trunk. We need to download GTK+ from trunk and rebuild. 
    cd ~/checkout/gnome2/
mv gtk+ gtk+-branch-2.12
svn co svn://svn.gnome.org/svn/gtk+/trunk gtk+
jhbuild build --no-network gtk+
  7. Perform Step 4 and get gedit running.

How to test?

  • Setup a keyboard layout that supports a good variety of dead keys. My preference is GBr (United Kingdom). Here, AltGr+[];’#/ and AltGr+{}:@~? produce different dead keys. You press one of these combinations and then you press a letter. If such a combination exists, then it gets printed. For example, the old GTK+ produces öõóôòx åōőxxx. The new GTK+ produces öõóôòọ åōőǒŏȯ (12 dead keys).
  • Setup Greek, Polytonic (Ancient Greek). The dead keys are [];’ {}:@ AltGr+[] (10 dead keys). Produce characters such as ᾅᾂᾷῗὕὒᾥᾢῷ.
  • Try compose sequences as described from the upstream file at XOrg. For example, 
    ComposeKey+(   1 0 )  produces ⑩. Try the same for 0-20, a-zA-Z.
  • Other miscellaneous, Ṩǟấẫǡ (using GBr layout)

The next step would be to parse the list of compose sequences and produce a documentation file.

Posted by simos
Filed in gnome
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2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Testing the updated IM support in GTK+”

  1. James Henstridge Says:

    March 6, 2008 at 8:41 am

    If you want to override the branch used for a few modules in jhbuild, just put something like the following in your ~/.jhbuildrc:

    branches[‘gtk+’] = None # build trunk

    That will override the module set you’re using.

  2. Pádraig Brady Says:

    March 6, 2008 at 10:29 am

    Thanks for this! It’s great to see GTK+ syncing up with X.
    What would rock would be to enhance the Char Map applet,
    to also show the compose sequence(s). I suppose one
    could just add it to the “character details” tab.

    Here’s a little script that I use to find the compose key
    (by pasting the parameter from the character map applet)

    http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ximkeys

    I wrote that when I was figuring out how dead keys
    and compose keys actually work in X:

    http://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/xkeyboard/


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