Bug 161945

Summary:	grave deadkey doesn't work in KDE apps
Product:	[Plasma] plasmashell	Reporter:	Matt Wood <matt-sw>
Component:	general	Assignee:	David Edmundson <kde>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	normal	CC:	andrew.crouthamel, and_s52, davidanema, nate, plasma-bugs
Priority:	NOR
Version:	5.19.5
Target Milestone:	1.0
Platform:	Ubuntu
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:

Description Matt Wood 2008-05-11 12:36:01 UTC

Version:           0.50.1 (using KDE 4.0.3)
Installed from:    Ubuntu Packages
OS:                Linux

I use a the UK keyboard layout with deadkeys, but for some reason the deadgrave key doesn't work in KDE apps. I'm using ubuntu and have kopete and amarok installed. all the other keys work fine and it works fine in non-kde apps.

any ideas?

Comment 1 George Goldberg 2008-06-30 03:41:19 UTC

*** Bug 163874 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2 David 2010-03-06 02:24:55 UTC

See the comment I made on #106538. I think I found the source of the dead key problem.

Comment 3 Andrew Crouthamel 2018-11-02 22:57:07 UTC

Dear Bug Submitter,

This bug has been stagnant for a long time. Could you help us out and re-test if the bug is valid in the latest version? I am setting the status to NEEDSINFO pending your response, please change the Status back to REPORTED when you respond.

Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!

Comment 4 David 2018-11-05 18:30:19 UTC

This bug is still valid. I did a fresh install of both Debian 9.5 and Kubuntu 18.04 on the weekend and noticed that KDE still exhibited odd behaviour around dead keys. Depending on exact locale settings, I would have no dead keys, or dead key combinations would insert incorrect characters.

However! I was able to solve the problem by modifying certain locale-specific files outside of KDE. I will describe below.

In my specific instance:

Keyboard: Canadian Multilingual
Locale: Esperanto

Solution:
add the following lines to /usr/share/X11/locale.alias  (package libx11-data):
eo.UTF-8 eo_XX.UTF-8
eo_XX.UTF-8 eo_XX.UTF-8
eo_EO.UTF-8 eo_EO.UTF-8

add the following lines to /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED (package locales):
eo ISO-8859-3
eo.UTF-8 UTF-8
eo_XX UTF-8
eo_XX.UTF-8 UTF-8

The above changes make sure that both locales and libx11-data are harmonized in terms of what encodings to use for EO locales. KDE is no longer confused. If other people are having problems with their dead keys in KDE, they should check the encoding definitions in the above 2 files, and, as an extra measure make sure that /etc/default/locale defines a default system locale that uses UTF-8 (in my case system default is now eo.UTF-8).

As a concluding note, since the solution for me was outside KDE, this may not be a KDE bug, however it is worth remembering that it is mostly KDE applications (specifically Qt applications) that are affected by mismatched locale definitions, and Gnome and other environments don't seem to have a problem.

I hope this is helpful.

Comment 5 Andrew Crouthamel 2018-11-05 20:36:41 UTC

Thanks for the update!

Comment 6 Christoph Feck 2018-11-05 22:49:19 UTC

This might be fixed with Qt 5.11.

Comment 7 David 2018-11-07 03:57:04 UTC

Edit: I also had to edit /etc/locales.gen to add

eo.UTF-8 UTF-8

and then run "sudo locale-gen"

Comment 8 Nate Graham 2020-09-28 23:47:11 UTC

*** Bug 416701 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***