No key event when compose keys are pressed

Question

I am supporting a legacy application for Sabre which maps some of the keys differently. For example, on a French keyboard the Compose key which is used to put a ^ on top of the vowel characters is to be remapped to produce a special character called a "Change Character" that has a special use for reservation agents that use Sabre
The problem is, the first time you press the ^ compose key there is no key event apparently because the VM figures it doesn't yet know what key to report, it is expecting you to press a character such as 'o' and then you get an 'o' with a '^' on top of it.
If you press the ^ compose key a second time, you get the following key events:
keyPressed
keyTyped
keyTyped
keyReleased
On the screen you will see two ^ characters appear. Currently I remap the ^ character to the "Change Character", and I suppress the second keyTyped event so that I only get one character. The problem is that the user ends up having to press the key twice to get one "Change Character."
I have no fix for this problem because there is no key event produced when they press the ^ compose key the first time.
By the way, this behavior appears to have been introduced with jdk 1.3. The older jdk did produce a key event the first time you pressed the compose key. I would expect that this behavior was considered to be a bug and was fixed in jdk 1.3.
Is there some other way to detect when the user presses a compose key? If not, is it possible for future jdk releases to report a keyPressed event when a compose key is pressed? This event would not cause a character to appear on the screen, but would allow programs to detect when the compose key is pressed.
There is already a key on the French keyboard that behaves this way. It is the key to the left of the '1' key and it has the pipe symbol on it. If you press Shift plus this pipe key, no character is produces but a keyPressed event with a keycode of 222 is produced. I merely point this out to show that there is a way to report key events whithout producing output on the screen.
Thanks, Brian Bruderer

Answer 1

I don't know if this actually helps, but it seems that you can bind an Action to a dead key like the circumflex of the French keyboard
Keymap keymap = textPane.addKeymap("MyEmacsBindings", textPane.getKeymap());
Action action = getActionByName(DefaultEditorKit.beginAction );
KeyStroke key = KeyStroke.getKeyStroke(KeyEvent.VK_DEAD_CIRCUMFLEX);
keymap.addActionForKeyStroke(key, action);I saw this on a Swing tutorial and modified it slightly. Have a look at it :
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/components/generaltext.html
Chris