> The feature freeze for XFree86 4.3.0 has just been announced (30 Nov
> 2002). I'm hoping that as many maps as possible will be converted to
> the multi-layout format in time for this release. Ideally I'd like to
> consider the layouts that aren't multi-layout friendly to be deprecated,
> and I'm not planning to accept further changes to them.
>
> Ivan, is there anything else you think needs to be done here?
Ideally it need some clean up especialy latin-based layouts.
As I already wrote I made new maps for all (almost all) maps I found
in the symbols directory.
With the 'non latin' maps (such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, etc.) there
are not problems. In such maps the national layout located in the second
group and in many cases these maps even don't touch the underlayind layout.
But the 'latin based' maps actually are combinations of a 'basic' layout
en_US and the national layout map itself.
Since I don't know all keyboard layouts in the world I simply loaded them
in turn into server (using XKbLayout option) and got the resulting maps.
First of all it seems to me that some symbols are redundand.
Looking through the maps I noticed that there are four group of latin
maps (such as Slavic, Northen Europe, Central Europe, etc.) which have
very similar layouts and differences between maps in the same group are
unsufficient. Therefore I think using of one 'basic map' for all of them
might bring some unneeded symbols in some maps.
Also I found differences which don't seems me national specific ones.
For example, most of maps defines the Space key as key with one symbol 'space'.
But there are maps where that key also has a 'nobreakspace' symbol (selectable
with some modifier). Or another example is an EuroSign. Some maps include
it but others don't. In most maps where it exists it placed on the 'e' key but
there are map(s) where where it shares place with the dollar sign. And more
funny thing that there are many maps wher the same key has a 'cent' symbol and
not less maps where it stands alone (in his level I mean).
As I wrote before I left the existent maps untoched and moved new maps in
the separate derectory. I understand it is a hell for map maintainers but
I'd like to expalin my reasons.
There is not problem to replace all old maps with new ones now. But the
new maps (latin based namely) have a significant difference. If in the
existent maps some additional symbols (dead keys and accented letters) are
in the second 'xkb group' in all new maps I needed move them in additional
'shift levels'.
The main disadvantage of this solution is that these shift levels are
invisible for an xmodmap and for applications which use Xlib without an XKB
support. (In case both sides use XKB only it works well.)
And also I'm not sure about how these symbols in new place depend on other
modifiers (I mean Shift, Lock an so on).
Therefore I'd like to ask all who use these maps to test new maps before
get rid of old ones. Although the modified xkb library loads the old map
if the layout is specified alone in the XkbLayout option there is a simple
trick which allows to load any new map alone.
If you specify layout as
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
the old map will be loaded, but the string
Option "XkbLayout" "us,"
makes server load the new map but without any additional layouts.
--
Ivan U. Pascal | e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Administrator of | Tomsk State University
University Network | Tomsk, Russia
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