> ?? Each user should easily be able to choose which keymapping to > use. It's very easy for anyone to change keymapping on Windows > and on Mac (among the installed/enabled ones). Hence the names > should be cleaned up, so as not to be too confusing.
I'd forgotton that, in fact. But it's true that with setxkbmap, a user can (and should be able to) change the xkb map. I would hope that the GUI tools would hide the cryptic filenames and use something easier (like the name[Group1] string).
ATM, the best GUI for this (advanced XKB control and management on the user side) seems to be GSwitchIt: I believe you can find it at
http://gswitchit.sf.net/
(though, it requires at least some parts of a working Gnome 2 environment)
I like the idea. While working on my proposal, I thought that a main
keymap per script was the way to go. Have a latin, cyrillic, greek, gujarati base, and change from there (qwerty, azerty, etc.).
At least cyrillic keyboards differ too much for this to work -- eg. there are many "phonetic" keyboards (which are similar with english ones based on the "sound") and there are completely different ones (a standard Russian I believe to be an example of this).
> The idea is then to combine keyboard type (Apple, Sun, MS, ...) and > language mapping; something like "ng/keyboard(apple)+ng/sv(svorak)" > for a Swedish Dvorak mapping on an Apple keyboard.
I really like the idea. However, I don't think we can move to fast. I'd prefer to do incremental changes towards something like this.
Isn't a "keycodes" directory the right place for "hardware" stuff? This should already be the case, unless I'm missing something.
> And no, keymappings are not for countries, they are for languages, > though there may be some country variation, so names like en-US > (which is a RFC 3066 language tag) are quite appropriate.
People have been thinking of these mappings as per country, and in
some cases it makes more sense than mapping per language. Here in Switzerland, the keyboard is different than the keyboard in Germany, France, and Italy, and the people use it to type German, French, and English. Adding a different keymap to de, fr, and it in order to make the same keymap doen't make much sense (though it should just be an include "de(ch)").
And again, there we see why the approach of having *both* is a good idea, with not too much work to do ;-)
Also, with the two-letter domain-names, people think that fr is
France, not French, then add the flag of France to the keymaps (because flags look good in the GUI). The distinction between languages and countries can be very political.
That's a GUI design issue, not a keymap design issue -- exactly that was recently discussed in relevance to GSwitchIt, and there were many comments on that side -- because of that, the "default" setting for GSwitchIt has changed from displaying flags, to *language* labels (I believe they're read from the Name[Group] stuff, though I'm not sure).
All of this was done on Gnome HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) lists, where there are many experts in GUI design -- so, your premise is incorrect (about the tendency to use flags for the keymaps :-).
Cheers, Danilo _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
