Hi, Markus, Your remark about X11 keyboard mapping reminds me of an interesting development in James Su's Smart Common Input Method (SCIM, http://www.scim-im.org/) which you and Simos and other readers of this list might find interesting if you are not already aware of it:
SCIM of course began life as an input method engine (IME) for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK), but if you download the latest release, you'll see that it now also has IMs for Russian YAWERTY and Amharic. (This is something I predicted would happen before it did because:) The keymap/IM tables for SCIM are an a very simple, easy-to-read-and-understand UTF-8 format, and SCIM has built-in support for composing and dead keys. So the result is that it is very easy to write an IM for SCIM, much, much easier than trying to figure out how to write one for X11 directly. I know that I'd rather write a SCIM IM table any day (Yudit would be the perfect tool for the task, of course). SCIM also integrates seamlessly in the tray icon of both KDE and GNOME, so it also provides a cross-desktop solution. Another nice thing about SCIM: After you have selected an IM (say, using the mouse), you can then toggle back and forth between, say your default English keyboard and the selected Chinese IM using just key combinations like CTRL + SPACE . That is, SCIM remembers which IM you have selected and gives you a simple toggle between the IM and your default keyboard. This is almost always what you really want. This is better than the Gnome and KDE tray icon wrappers for switching the XKB keyboards which will force you to mouse-click through a large list if you have installed a large number of keyboards (for example, I have 7 keyboard maps installed en, ar, fr, devanagari, lo, es, and th (Thai) and it is annoying to have to cycle through all of them when what I really want is en->th->en or en->fr->en, etc.). Anyone, especially anyone who is dissatisfied with XKB keyboards, should take a look at SCIM and see what you think. Look in the "additional" subdirectory of the "scim-tables" package where you'll find the Yawerty map, as well as Vietnamese, Amharic, and Arabic tables to serve as examples. > Considering how complex keyboard mapping has become under X11 (3-4 > mechanisms layered on top of each other), none of the two things are in > any way obvious to me from reading your description. > > Markus > > -- > Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__ > > > -- > Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels > Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/ > > > -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
