using non-ASCII characters in input sequence (m17n?)

[silmeth]

Hi, I’ve recently tried to move from ibus to fcitx5 and thus I tried to migrate my Cyrillic ibus-table input method to m17n so that I could use it in fcitx. The first attempt can be seen in my dotfiles on gitlab.

But I have a problem. I use Polish keyboard as my main default keyboard layout – and Polish layout lets me input characters like ⟨ż⟩ via AltGr + z, or ⟨ę⟩ via AltGr + e – and I did use those in the input sequences to transform them into Cyrillic ⟨ж⟩ and ⟨ѧ⟩ respectively.

So I added rules like these to my mapping:

    ("Ż" ?Ж)
    ("ż" ?ж)

but they don’t work – when I switch the input method to my Cyrillic, hitting AltGr + z produced unchanged Polish ⟨ż⟩.

The m17n data format spec says about KEYSEQ:

MTEXT in the definition of KEYSEQ consists of characters that can be generated by a keyboard. Therefore MTEXT usually contains only ASCII characters. However, if the input method is intended to be used, for instance, with a West European keyboard, MTEXT may contain Latin-1 characters.

so I’d expect this to work. Is this a bug in fcitx5, a consciously enforced limitation? Is there a way around it?

I also tried making rules with modifier keys explicitly myself, eg:

    ((A-z) ?ж)

and this lets me use the left Alt but not the right one, I also tried:

    ((G-z) ?ж)

(G- is the m17n prefix for AltGr) but this does nothing with my Polish keyboard layout.

[wengxt]

While it's totally up to you that whether to use m17n to implement it, have you checked the table engine in fcitx5? (It's a part of fcitx5-chinese-addons).

Use libime_tabledict to convert it
interslavic-cyrillic.txt

libime_tabledict interslavic-cyrillic.txt interslavic-cyrillic.main.dict

And save it to ~/.local/share/fcitx5/table/

Save this file to ~/.local/share/fcitx5/inputmethod/ you may want to update the informational field to some other value like lang code & name.
interslavic-cyrillic.conf

[wengxt]

You can also check some other examples in fcitx5-table-other on how it works

e.g.
https://github.com/fcitx/fcitx5-table-other/tree/master/tables/pa

[silmeth]

Thanks! This does work. :)

I couldn’t find any documentation how to make a new table layout, only found this outdated(?) wiki article which said that input keys must be ASCII – so I assumed that still likely holds. I see it’s not the case anymore.

So this solves my particular problem.

Still the question about m17n holds – shouldn’t non-ASCII input characters in the key seq work there?

[wengxt]

m17n was moved to fcitx/fcitx5-m17n#4

[silmeth]

Thanks!

[wengxt]

@silmeth I made some investigation and commented on fcitx/fcitx5-m17n#4, please take a look.