[Apologies for the cross-posting] Hello, Thanks to the pointers provided by Peter Robinson, I got the Meego FVKBD (Free Virtual Keyboard)ยน running along with Sugar. A problem with the current FVKBD is that it supports only one base layout. Even "variants" of that layout (eg: CapsLock enabled, Symbols, etc) are treated as "temporary", which means that you press the "Caps" key, enter a capital letter, and immediately after that, it gets reset back to the base layout (lower case qwerty). I wanted something which would be similar to the existing physical keyboards that we ship with the XO machines - with a dedicated key to switch between different scripts in the same keyboard. I had to extend the code of FVKBD to implement that, and with the modified FVKBD, I have spun a live-cd ISO (based on the current SOAS). You can download it from http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/sugar-vkbd-test/sugar-vkbd-test.iso Apart from the modified FVKBD, I have added a default keyboard definition file which is for English + Bengali, and I've also included a sugar device-icon on the frame to control the appearance of the keyboard.
I realize that more needs to be done to support non Latin scripts, and here are some of the issues I faced while converting the existing XKB Bengali layout: * Many scripts do not have a concept of upper case/lower case - so we need some other script specific way to divide the characters * In the current XKB configurations, non-symbol characters from other scripts are often placed in the position of what normally is symbols for QWERTY keyboards * Numerals pose an interesting problem, since in some places, native numerals/digits are quickly being obsoleted, and latin numerals (1,2,3..) are becoming the de-facto standard. In these cases, it may make sense to provide only _one_ layout/state for numerals, and allow users to input native numerals by hovering (touch + hold) on the virtual key for the latin digit. Among the general issues, I'm not sure how to deal with the keyboard taking up half of the screen real estate - it may be worthwhile to see if we can have a "split screen" sort of configuration while the keyboard is active. Thoughts, feedback, etc would be appreciated :-). Thanks, Sayamindu [1] http://git.moblin.org/cgit.cgi/fvkbd/ -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
