Dead acute + c still produces ć instead of the more widely used ç

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Aug 05, 2019 at 11:07:08AM +0200, Nilson Santos Figueiredo Jr. wrote:
> I just got a new laptop and installed the newest LTS Ubuntu version.
> To my surprise, Ubuntu still cannot produce ç properly out-of-the-box in
> the regular way when using the "US international with dead keys" layout.

I believe that this behaviour is defined by libx11
(https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libx11) and it isn't as simple
as saying that it always produces ć: it's supposed to depend on your
locale.  A grep should make the intent clear:

  <cjwatson at niejwein ~/src/freedesktop/libx11 (master=)>$ git grep '^<dead_acute> <c>' nls
  nls/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre:<dead_acute> <c>                    : "ć"   U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
  nls/fi_FI.UTF-8/Compose.pre:<dead_acute> <c>                        :  "ć"  U0107  #  LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
  nls/iso8859-1/Compose.pre:<dead_acute> <c>                      : "\347"        ccedilla
  nls/iso8859-13/Compose.pre:<dead_acute> <c>                     : "\343"        cacute
  nls/iso8859-15/Compose.pre:<dead_acute> <c>                     : "\347"        ccedilla
  nls/iso8859-2/Compose.pre:<dead_acute> <c>                      : "\346"        cacute
  nls/pt_BR.UTF-8/Compose.pre:<dead_acute> <c>                    : "ç" ccedilla  # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
  nls/pt_PT.UTF-8/Compose.pre:<dead_acute> <c>    : "ç" ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA

I hope this will help you narrow down where the problem is: either the
compose definitions aren't taking effect, in which case you'd need to
track down what's supposed to be applying them and isn't, or the compose
definitions are wrong, in which case you would be best off taking this
up with X11 upstream.

(That said, while I don't use dead-key layouts myself, I seem to get ç
when I type Compose ' c even though that isn't what the Compose file
says I should get.  Not quite sure what's going on there.)

> "Ć" is a character that is used in Polish (38.5 million speakers) and
> apparently also Croatian (6 millions speakers) and some related languages
> when using loanwords.
> "Ç" on the other hand, is used by Portuguese (215-260 million speakers),
> French (80 million native, 270 million total speakers), Turkish (75
> million), Catalan (4-10million), Albanian (5 million), Azerbaijani (23
> million), plus at least Tatar, Turkmen, Kurdish and Zazaki, Friulian,
> Ligurian and Occitan.

Given that this is (as far as I can tell) supposed to depend on the
locale, there should be no need to play off different groups of people
against each other like this.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]