Using shifted function keys in XKB keyboard layout

Question

I'm working on a Khmer keyboard layout and I've run into a problem at the last step of the project.

Khmer has 33 consonant characters, 24 vowel diacritic characters, and another 14 independent vowels characters. On top of this, I have included each character's corresponding International Phonetic Alphabet symbol(s) in my layout at the ALT and SHIFT-ALT levels, so very quickly I'm running out of space.

To alleviate this I was planning to map the 24 vowel diacritics to F1 - F12 and SHIFT F1 - F12 (with the corresponding IPA characters at the ALT and SHIFT/ALT levels) but the SHIFT + FN, ALT + FN and SHIFT/ALT + FN combinations don't register. I've tried the combinations in different text editors, browsers, and the terminal but none work. It seems to be a system wide problem.

I am running Ubuntu 10.04.

Here's the section in my layout that pertains to the FN keys:

key <FK01> { [ 0x10017b6,       0x10017c2,      voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK02> { [ 0x10017b7,       0x10017c3,      voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK03> { [ 0x10017b8,       0x10017c4,      voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK04> { [ 0x10017b9,       0x10017c5,      voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK05> { [ 0x10017ba,       voidsymbol,     voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK06> { [ 0x10017bb,       voidsymbol,     voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK07> { [ 0x10017bc,       voidsymbol,     voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK08> { [ 0x10017bd,       voidsymbol,     voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK09> { [ 0x10017be,       voidsymbol,     voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK10> { [ 0x10017bf,       voidsymbol,     voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK11> { [ 0x10017c0,       voidsymbol,     voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };
key <FK12> { [ 0x10017c1,       voidsymbol,     voidsymbol, voidsymbol  ] };

As you can see I've only filled out SHIFT F1 - F4 so far, I'll do the rest when or if I get those keys working.

Hopefully some of you can point me in the right direction.

Answer 1

I don't know why the combinations don't register, but as an alternative solution think perhaps of utilising more levels per key, for example using level5 (by including one of the symbol definitions to map some key to the level5 modifier) and defining the key mapping using an eight-level type, such as EIGHT_LEVEL or EIGHT_LEVEL_ALPHABETIC.