Nadav Har'El wrote on 2003-07-06: > I'm sure the teacher of the workshop will give them ideas, but I thought it > would be nice if people on this list could also raise ideas for project, > and I'll pass them on to the students (I know one of them). > After trying (again) to make sense of loadkeys with UTF-8, I have yet another project idea that would do the world a good service:
Design a keymap format that doesn't lose and make it work for at least both XFree86 and the linux console - but supporting a dozen other programs with custom keymap formats would make it really useful (vim, emacs, lyx, yudit, geresh, doesn't this list suggest that a common format is missing?). Since getting a new format into all these programs will not be easy (I expect Xkb and emacs' leim to be especially loath to give up their existing formats, nor does it make sense to lose the power of leim at least), a smarter approach would be to compile from the master format into the formats accepted by each of these programs. And to avoid collecting the data by hand, reverse compilers from the most complete databases (leim & Xkb?) should be implemented. This shouldn't be hard to code in any scripting language but the interesting part is inventing a standard keymap format that will be useful for a wide range of users for a long time. Full-blown input methods for eastern languages should be left out of this project -- just handle all "simple" keymaps that can be described with a reasonable-size FSM. To make this really useful, the data should be made re-usable at least partially under any weird settings (e.g. keep the definition of a "hebrew layout" independent of what keys should trigger a layout change (Xkb comes close to get this right). But pointless dependance between parts should be avoided, e.g. instead of inventing custom names for all possible keys and keysyms (like in Xkb) they should just use Unicode. -- Beni Cherniavsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> If I don't hack on it, who will? And if I don't GPL it, what am I? And if it itches, why not now? [With apologies to Hilel ;] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
