Bug 860552

On Microsoft Windows, there is the “English International Keyboard”.
It is very similar in behaviour to the m17n:t:latn-pre input method:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#US-International

typing "a becomes ä, typing ~n becomes ñ, ..., i.e. one can type
almost all accented Latin characters easily using a US keyboard.

This is not hidden and easily available in the keyboard settings
in Windows:

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/keyboards/winkeyvista.html#international

So this seems to be useful enough to have it accessible.

This is extremely useful one one types text in several European
languages.  For example, if one types both French *and* German, it is
much easier to stick to one keyboard layout and type the accented
characters using such an input method then switching between French
and German keyboard layout all the time.

French and German keyboard layouts are very different:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Austria_and_Germany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#French

one cannot get easily used to such different keyboard layouts, so
typing speed will suffer a lot.

For touch typing, one needs to stick to a layout and get used to
it. Even the difference between the US English and the German keyboard
layout (z and y are swapped, common ASCII characters like []{}\|<>()
are in different positions) is very annoying, switching between US
English and German layout is already quite bad for typing speed.

Switching between very different layouts like between French (azerty)
and German keyboard layout only to be able to type some accented
characters is just terrible. 

In my opinion, if one types accented characters from different
European languages, using something like a latn-pre input method is
far better than switching keyboard layouts.

It is also better than using the Compose mechanism in X11 because there
one has to type

    Multi_key " a

to get ä instead of just

    " a

which means one has to type one key more which is also usually in an
inconvenient position which forces one to move the fingers from the
touch typing base position and back.

So something like the latn-pre and latn-post input methods should be
easily available without setting some obscure key with gsettings.

(In reply to comment #1)
> On Microsoft Windows, there is the “English International Keyboard”.
> It is very similar in behaviour to the m17n:t:latn-pre input method:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#US-International
> 
> typing "a becomes ä, typing ~n becomes ñ, ..., i.e. one can type
> almost all accented Latin characters easily using a US keyboard.

This is exactly what the "English (US, international with dead keys)" keyboard layout does. And it is visible by default although you can argue that the labeling isn't ideal but we could change that.

> So something like the latn-pre and latn-post input methods should be
> easily available without setting some obscure key with gsettings.

I don't see why you'd need those since they just seem to be duplicating the functionality of the above mentioned keyboard layout.

These input methods are not blacklisted anymore, so we
can consider this fixed.