Bug 2337

Functional keysyms for multimedia keyboards generally need to be reviewied and
need to be added to Appendix A of the X11 protocol standard. I hope to get
around to doing something on this by X11R7.1.

Assigning bu to myself

It's not only multimedia keyboards. When I submited this I was trying to
configure a remote (ati_remote) for a HTPC.

I though I'd mention it, didn't know if it's important.

How do theese keysyms relate to the USB HID standard?

The USB HID Usage Tables at http://www.usb.org/developers/hidpage/ contain a
large number of identifiers for very specialized "controls", ranging from
"deactivate autopilot" and "release chaff" for a military flight simulator to
"snooze" and "am/pm" for an alarm clock. Many of these controls to not relate to
keycaps, but to potentiometer angles or positions.

There is no easy and obvious mapping between all these controls and keysyms. In
addition, the USB HID Usage Tables just give a short English name to a control,
and do not even specify a graphical keyboard symbol.

It is at present not clear to me, how useful a reference the USB HID usage
tables will be for adding new multimedia keysyms to the X11 standard, but it
should certainly be consulted to align the terminology used.

Another possibly useful reference are standards for symbols used on equipment,
such as IEC 60417 and ISO 7000. These cover most of the graphical symbols for
function buttons that you might find on a tape recorder, TV remote control,
photo copier, dishwasher, washing mashine, car user interface, etc. and assign
numbers to them. Perhaps these should simply be mapped en-bloc into the keysym
space? For example, your fast forward button is symbol number 5108 (defilement
rapide; fast run, fast speed) in IEC 60417, and variant B of this symbol looks
like two black right-pointing triangles next to each other.

However, these standards are a bit older and would only cover symbols found in
equipment up to the mid 1990s. They do not (yet) have symbols for "My
documents", "Email", "Homepage", "Instant Messager" and other keys that
Microsoft blesses new keyboard with.

Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys.  Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.

commit 1cf41088ff751e60071a519466b5a51b65c7626a
Author: Bastien Nocera <bnocera@redhat.com>
Date:   Wed Oct 15 14:20:45 2008 +1030

    Keysyms needed for some HID remote controls to work under X. #16519
    
    In particular, this enables Sony Ericsson phones and PS3 BD remotes.
    
    X.Org Bug 16519 <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16519>
    
    Signed-off-by: Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer@redhat.com>

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 16519 ***