Dead and Compose keys (was: Re: Romanized Singhala got great reception in Sri Lanka)

[Naena Guru]

Marc,

Yes, making keyboard layouts is not difficult.

I believed that language tools are selected for each language manually when
input. I did not know that there is an automatic switching of language
tools say when you switch to French keyboard from English. That shouldn't
be difficult to make for RS, though.

In the case of romanized Singhala, any processing that English accepts, it
accepts too. For RS, you select a font to display it in the native script
because if it is mixed with English, both are using the same character
space, just as when English and French are mixed.

Spell checking, grammar checking for Unicode Singhala? There are no such
things for it there. It is in the stage of struggling to input text:
special programs, physical keyboards etc. I saw them. They have a special
IT category of employees to input Unicode Sinhala. They have special places
called Typesetting kiosks in Lanka where you go to get your résumé and term
paper printed.




On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Marc Durdin <marc at keyman.com> wrote:

>  I disagree.  Making a basic keyboard layout is not hard, just like
> making a font without OpenType support is not that hard.   Making a
> keyboard layout that doesn’t force users to learn the nuances of the
> encoding of a script is more of a challenge, and making a high quality
> keyboard layout that is consistent, easy to use, and efficient is anything
> but straightforward.  Most keyboard layouts fail at one of these.
>
>
>
> The story for touch device input is even more challenging.  Not being
> constrained to a physical set of keys increases your flexibility.  The big
> challenge is usually the size of the display on mobile-sized devices.
>
>
>
> Regarding keyboard design:
>
> ·         Scan make/break codes are not really relevant to Windows
> keyboards – Windows has an abstraction layer of ‘virtual key’ codes, for
> better or worse.
>
> ·         Selecting US-English for a non-English keyboard means that all
> language tools will break with your text.  Spell checking, grammar
> checking, automatic keyboard selection, autocorrect, font selection and
> more.  That’s a big price to pay.  Conversely, selecting Singhala for your
> Romanised non-Unicode encoding will break spell checking, grammar checking,
> automatic keyboard selection, autocorrect, font selection and more.
>
>
>
> Marc
>
>
>
> *From:* Unicode [mailto:unicode-bounces at unicode.org] *On Behalf Of *Naena
> Guru
> *Sent:* Tuesday, 18 March 2014 3:08 AM
> *To:* Doug Ewell
> *Cc:* UnicoDe List
> *Subject:* Re: Dead and Compose keys (was: Re: Romanized Singhala got
> great reception in Sri Lanka)
>
>
>
> Making a keyboard is not hard. You can either edit an existing one or make
> one from scratch. I made the latest Romanized Singhala one from scratch.
> The earlier one was an edit of US-International.
>
>
>
> When you type a key on the physical keyboard, you generate what is called
> a scan-code of that key so that the keyboard driver knows which key was
> pressed. (During DOS days, we used to catch them to make menus.) Now, you
> assign one or a sequence of Unicode characters you want to generate for the
> keypress.
>
>
>
> Use Microsft's keyboard layout creator for all versions of Windows from XP:
>
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964665.aspx
>
>
>
> Select the language carefully. I selected US-English for RS. That way, I
> can switch between the two keyboards quickly with Ctrl+Shift. You can
> change all these in the Control Panel.
>
>
>
> Here is the keymap I made for RS in Linux:
>
> http://ahangama.com/apiapi/singhala/linuxkb-s.php
>
> Just scroll down for the English part. (The lines starting with double
> slashes are comments and have no effect on the program)
>
>
>
> The Macintosh key layout is easy too.
>
>
>
> The story with iOS and Android are different but not hard either.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 6:47 PM, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:
>
> Jean-François Colson <jf at colson dot eu> wrote:
>
> The idea here was “that characters not on an ordinary QWERTY keyboard
> could be entered _using_an_ordinary_QWERTY_keyboard._” Are there any
> dead keys on an _ordinary_ (i.e. not one using an international(ized)
> driver) QWERTY keyboard?
>
>
> Not on the standard vanilla U.S. keyboard. It has to be provided by the
> OS, via a driver, just as Compose key support has to be provided by the OS.
>
> The standard vanilla U.S. keyboard also doesn't provide the accented
> letters and other non-ASCII letters like ð that Naena Guru uses for his
> font hack.
>
> If a character is available by a dead key, isn’t it on the keyboard ?
>
>
> It depends on what you mean by "on the keyboard." Thanks to John Cowan's
> delightful Moby Latin keyboard layout, I can type AltGr+\ followed by 7 to
> get the fraction ⅐ (one-seventh). That character is not "on the keyboard"
> in any sense other than what the driver provides.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA
> http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­
> _______________________________________________
> Unicode mailing list
> Unicode at unicode.org
> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
>
>
>
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