Hello, I am still a new user of Colemak and I have so much to learn about keyboard layout design. I still thought it would be right to ask, is there a particular reason for AltGr diacritics outputting standalone rather than combining characters? E.g.
AltGr+M mreturning ¯m instead of m̄ (the Taiwanese negation word). Is it better to not use combining Unicode characters?
You didn't mention which OS and which Colemak implementation you're using, but most so-called "deadkey" implementations work as a predefined mapping of base characters to modified characters, allowing only for certain predefined combinations.
The problem with "m with macron" is that it does not exist in Unicode as a precomposed character; it can only be formed as a combination of base letter + Unicode combining character, and as such is not representable in such deadkey tables – which, dating from pre-Unicode times, work with single characters.
An alternative solution is to assign the Unicode combining macron character U+0304 to a key (AltGr+M or another), and enter it after the base character.
What Ghen said. Unfortunately, combining accents isn't robustly implemented everywhere. Several Unicode points in fact exists as hybrid combinations of base and combining points, rather than as precomposed characters. I think it may depend on typeface implementation as well? It's a bit messy.
*** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
*** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***
