Compose key confusion concerning 'ç' and 'ć'

Question

I type in both French and Polish and therefore require both the 'ç' and 'ć' characters to be easy to enter. According to compose key documentation I find on the Internet, for example at http://hermit.org/Linux/ComposeKeys.html, ,+c = ç and '+c = ć. Yet, composing either of these results in 'ç'.

I have my language set to U.S. English in UTF-8:

$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
$ echo $LANGUAGE
en

The following lines in my /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8 corroborate that my compose key should not be behaving this way:

<dead_cedilla> <c>                  : "ç"   ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<Multi_key> <comma> <c>             : "ç"   ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA
<Multi_key> <cedilla> <c>           : "ç"   ccedilla # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA

<dead_acute> <c>                    : "ć"   U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
<Multi_key> <acute> <c>             : "ć"   U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE
<Multi_key> <apostrophe> <c>        : "ć"   U0107 # LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH ACUTE

I am running Ubuntu 12.04.

Can anyone reproduce this issue? If so, can anyone offer an explanation and/or a solution? Interestingly, in this post the user is experiencing a similar but opposite issue.

Answer 1

By default, Ubuntu (via GNOME) ignores locale-specific and customised compose-key configuration files in favour of a global, hard-coded configuration (because apparently hard-coding configuration info is a good idea now). You can overrule this genius decision by adding the following line to ~/.gnomerc:

export GTK_IM_MODULE="xim"

Tested and working on Ubuntu 13.04 (so presumably it'll also work on 12.10) - more info here.