On 18/09/2006, at 7:47 PM, F Wolff wrote:
>>
>> I also modified my keyboard layout to include the characters I was
>> often swapping keyboards to access (e.g. all the Shift-number
>> characters, characters like æ and « ») or getting from the special
>> characters palette. But there are the ones I use less often, like the
>> Greek characters: the palette is fine for them.
>
> I think that editing the layout is out of reach of many non-technical
> people. It might even be impossible using an unprivileged account  
> (like
> in an Internet café).

It's beyond me, nowadays, too. I used Ukelele. [1]  But I agree that  
people might not have access to such an app., and especially via  
service access like a Net café or school machine.
>
> [The Wiki-VI character palette] seems like about 147 characters if  
> all the upper case characters are
> included. (Weird number - it seems that no upper case '₫' is  
> provided.)

It's certainly needed.

> With good spacing to seperate the characters visually, this ends up
> taking up a lot of space in Pootle underneath the buttons, and might
> frustrate those who have proper input configured. Perhaps only common
> ones should be provided in such a case. For Vietnamese, perhaps all  
> the
> upper case characters except 'Đ' can be removed.

The only upper-case letters required would be:

ÀẢÃÁẠ
ĂẰẲẴẮẶ
ÂẦẨẪẤẬ
ÈẺẼÉẸ
ÊỀỂỄẾỆ
ÌỈĨÍỊ
ÒỎÕÓỌ
ÔỒỔỖỐỘ
ƠỜỞỠỚ
ÙỦŨÚỤ
ƯỪỬỮỨ
ỲỶỸÝỴ
Đ

The same for lower-case (we have 12 vowels and 6 tones, making 72  
vowel characters), plus the currency symbol ₫ . (You could probably  
exclude the Latin-1 range from the list above, but we can't assume  
everyone knows how to create those characters on a standard keyboard,  
or even if the keyboard used is standard.)

However, I agree strongly that such a palette should be optional.  
Those of us who do have proper input configured would find it very  
distracting, even annoying. Additionally, I would hope that we could  
help people enable their own input, if possible: each Pootle could  
have a link to such info. on its Vietnamese language page.

> Perhaps we should be
> popping it up with some fancy effect when you hover over some area.

Only if it's selected on the Options page?
>
>>
>> BTW, having your characters defined in Unicode doesn't mean they are
>> necessarily available in a font or input system.<snip>
>
> I was actually mixing things in my writing. I meant that we don't need
> combined diacritics - there are code points for all the characters we
> need.

Ah, I see. :)

Thank Heavens, we do have code points for all our characters. There  
must be quite a few less common written languages which don't yet,  
and that would be a significant barrier to using them on a computer.

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN

[1] http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ukelele

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