Thank you, Richard, for your feedback! On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Richard Wordingham <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:40:59 -0400 > Ed Trager <[email protected]> wrote: > > Please check it out and provide me feedback: >> >> http://unifont.org/keycurry/ > > My quick look was done on Ubuntu 10.04 using Firefox 11.0 Canonical-1.0 > with a UK keyboard, with the mapping set to GB keyboard unless > otherwise advised. >
Key Curry currently assumes usage of a U.S. ASCII QWERTY keyboard. I need to do possibly quite a bit of additional work to support non-U.S. QWERTY and non-QWERTY layouts. I guess that is the bad news. On the flip side, the good news is that because many other bugs have now been squashed, I can now spend time to research and implement some fixes to support other physical keyboard layouts. The biggest problem is not the re-ordering of keys (think AZERTY vs. QWERTY) but the fact that certain other non-letter symbols may not be available at all on other keyboards. I don't think this is too much of a problem for UK keyboards, but it could be a problem for the numerous other kinds of physical keyboards out there in the world. > > General: > 1. It would be nice if the Key Curry windows could be > dragged outside of the browser window - my natural desire is not to > clutter the browser window with a keyboard. > > Tests with Thai keyboard selected in Key Curry: > 2. On the Thai keyboard map, U+0E03 KHO KHUAT is > misdisplayed on the rubout key - it should be on the > US keyboard key for '\'. (The same problem has been cloned > to the Lanna keyboard, and somehow also to the Lao keyboard.) > Yes this is a weird bug! Thanks for pointing it out -- I'll work on fixing it! > 3. Thai combining characters are misdisplayed in all the keyboard > maps I've looked at - presumably a problem with rendering systems > declining to display them on U+25CC when explicitly requested to. > (Does TUS need to say something about the display of U+25CC > and combining characters?) I get a big dotted circle followed by > a small dotted circle displaying the combining character. > This bug seems to be Linux-specific. The combining marks for Thai and Lao appear correctly over DOTTED CIRCLE U+25CC in browsers on OSX and WIN7. I have noticed that Thai and Lao combining marks do tend to look better when positioned over ASCII DASH "-" or LATIN LOWER CASE X "x" : this might be because the Thai and Lao font authors may have optimized these cases in modern OpenType fonts (the "-" and "x" are frequently used as the surrogate base character in primers in Thailand and Laos, so this makes sense). Key Curry however needs to implement a generic solution across all scripts for displaying combining marks in isolation, and thus using DOTTED CIRCLE U+25CC is presumably a better choice than using, say, an "x". Do you also see the "double dotted circle" problem with, say, an Arabic keyboard's diacrtical marks? > > 4. Typing with a Thai (Kesmanee) keyboard (via X) got some > bizarre results, presumably because of the problem that > browsers still don't return key identifications properly. > For example, typing the key > physically labelled '2' produced U+0E1D FO FA, presumably > because on the Thai keyboard that is the key for '/', and the > key physically labelled '/' on my UK keyboard produces > FO FA when the keyboard mapping is set to Thai in X. > Key Curry is designed to be used when your operating system keyboard layout is set to a QWERTY layout, so that Key Curry can remap the letters and symbols on a QWERTY keyboard to some other set of letters/symbols. If you already have a Thai Ketmanee keyboard via X, then you don't need Key Curry, do you? --- Unless of course you don't like the Ketmanee layout -- then you might like to try the new "Easy Thai" phonetic/mnemonic layout that I just added this past weekend. > Inspection of Lanna Keyboard: > 5. How should I enter the number 67 in Tham digits? > Entering () yields the dotted circle. > Is entering and deleting a character between them the only method? OK, this is a bug with the Lanna Keyboard -- I will fix this. > > 6. Having a way of viewing the 2-key keymaps would be useful. > That's what the "Map" tab does. Is that not sufficient? > > 7. So far as I am aware, what appear to be U+0E4F THAI > CHARACTER > FONGMAN and U+0E5B THAI CHARACTER KHOMUT > serving as punctuation in a Lanna text have not been declared > to be glyph variants of U+1AA4 TAI THAM SIGN HOY and > U+1AAC TAI THAM SIGN HANG. It would therefore be > useful to have them. > Do you have some evidence you can point out to me showing that THAI FONGMAN and THAI KHOMUT (or something looking a lot like those symbols) are used in Lanna texts? Perhaps there is a manuscript on the http://www.laomanuscripts.net digital library that shows such usage? > > 8. Double width ASCII punctuation is probably desirable for the > use of the Lanna script in Sipsongpanna - SIL New Tai Lue > fonts have recently added it for the New Tai Lue variant of the > script, and I soon encountered it when googling for > New Tai Lue text. > I can certainly consider adding appropriately widely-spaced ASCII punctuation in the Hariphunchai Thai Tham font (http://hariphunchai.unifont.org/) that I am working on : If you used Key Curry and your local machine lacks a Thai Tham font, then Key Curry will load a development snapshot of Hariphunchai as a web font. > Richard. > >
