Non-ASCII chars in quail rules

[Perry E. Metzger]

This is an elisp question, and it *seemed* more appropriate on the
devel list, but if I'm wrong, I'll move the question elsewhere.

Briefly, my problem is this: my caps lock key is never used for
anything on my keyboard, and I thought it might be cool to use it
as a poor man's compose key for entering non-ASCII characters.

I mapped it to F19 and then set that to insert the Unicode character
for the Compose glyph (U+2384) thinking it would be especially
appropriate.

I then realized that "quail-define-rules" really doesn't play well
with KEY strings that aren't pure ASCII.

1) Is there any easy way to fix that? Simply removing the < 127 test
in the code that builds the maps doesn't work. (I'm afraid I don't
fully understand where the maps are used, which is probably a
problem.)

2) If there isn't an easy way to fix that, is there any obvious
simple way to build an input method that either signals the beginning
of a translated series of characters either with a non-ASCII character
(like U+2384) or with a function key like F19 directly?

I note that essentially the only way of building input methods these
days seems to be quail, or at least, almost all the shipped methods
use quail.

BTW, if it isn't obvious, yes, I could just set the key to enter some
ASCII character (see the rfc1345 input method for example) but my
goal here is to *not* require anything special to enter normal ASCII
but to use the caps lock key as some sort of compose key.

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger                address@hidden