This year I changed my Linux box to run Gentoo, but unfortunately this great distro misses support for Esperanto-specific letters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ). As an Esperanto speaker and daily reader this really annoys me. Two points are worth mentioning: 1) Adequate font support Some fonts have these letters, others don't. For example, if I browse to www.gxangalo.com using Firefox, the site's contents appear well, but the title bar misses the Ĝ. The tab's font shows it, but the font used in KDE task bar doesn't. 2) Adequate keyboard support My old Linux box (Mandrake) could be patched simply by giving this input to xmodmap: keycode 53 = X NoSymbol Ccircumflex keycode 42 = G NoSymbol Gcircumflex keycode 43 = H NoSymbol Hcircumflex keycode 44 = J NoSymbol Jcircumflex keycode 39 = S NoSymbol Scircumflex keycode 30 = U NoSymbol Ubreve AltGr + C generates the copyright symbol, so I put Ĉ in the X key. (AltGr is the right Alt key.) This doesn't work with Gentoo. No symbol is generated by the AltGr + letter combination. It seems the codes in the right column are not defined. What I would really want to use is not AltGr combinations, but normal accent keys, as I do while writing Portuguese: ~ + a =
This year I changed my Linux box to run Gentoo, but unfortunately this great distro misses support for Esperanto-specific letters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ). As an Esperanto speaker and daily reader this really annoys me. Two points are worth mentioning: 1) Adequate font support Some fonts have these letters, others don't. For example, if I browse to www.gxangalo.com using Firefox, the site's contents appear well, but the title bar misses the Ĝ. The tab's font shows it, but the font used in KDE task bar doesn't. 2) Adequate keyboard support My old Linux box (Mandrake) could be patched simply by giving this input to xmodmap: keycode 53 = X NoSymbol Ccircumflex keycode 42 = G NoSymbol Gcircumflex keycode 43 = H NoSymbol Hcircumflex keycode 44 = J NoSymbol Jcircumflex keycode 39 = S NoSymbol Scircumflex keycode 30 = U NoSymbol Ubreve AltGr + C generates the copyright symbol, so I put Ĉ in the X key. (AltGr is the right Alt key.) This doesn't work with Gentoo. No symbol is generated by the AltGr + letter combination. It seems the codes in the right column are not defined. What I would really want to use is not AltGr combinations, but normal accent keys, as I do while writing Portuguese: ~ + a = ã, ` + a = à, and so on. The combinations for Esperanto would be: ^ + c = ĉ, ^ + g = ĝ, ^ + h = ĥ, ^ + j = ĵ, ^ + s = ŝ, ~ + u = ŭ The tilde seems adequate to use with U, because the tilded U is not used by any major language (I guess) and the correct accent is missing in most keyboards. Please add this support, as esperantists normally are enthusiasts of free software and tend to use and support Linux. As I have explained, other distros give better support and even provide translations for the installation process. Enough copy-and-paste for now :^) Please give my beloved letters back ;^) Could you please give a workaround for the xmodmap script? Cheers, --- Moisés
Created attachment 90244 [details] A snapshot showing problems with fonts
Well, I don't know Esperanto language, and since 1.) most Esperanto related howtos I found were in Esperanto and 2.) I'm not sure how to check errors you've reported, I'm not sure what to do here. That's said, this is quite old bug. Since that time too many things changed. X11 now has Esperanto keyboard layout: /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/epo. So probably it works out of box. Also since you see fonts inside browser there are required fonts support. All you need is to use correct fonts in your window manager. And again probably works out of box now. Also you've not mentioned but now we have Esperanto dictionaries for myspell (spelling in OpenOffice should work) and aspell. So, please, do your tests another time.
