In anticipation of getting rid of the iMacs in the lab, I was considering how to provide decent non-English character maps. The little applet I have doesn't allow you to insert combinations, so it's ultimately not the tool we need.

A little research turned up two very useful things: KeyboardLayoutEditor and LanguageGeek's keyboard layouts.

With them we should be able to construct custom keyboards that address the needs of projects like the Moses dictionary. Alternatively, and perhaps more forward-looking, we could write some xslt to convert MacOS .keylayout files to xkb format. MacOS keyboards are easier to find (e.g. languagegeek.com has MacOS keyboards for all listed languages), and written in XML, so it should be relatively easy-ish.