Re: Combined Yorùbá characters with dot below and tonal diacritics

[Luis de la Orden]

Dear all,

I am delighted with the amount of information you have kindly shared with
me. I was watching the discussion as it evolved please see my comments as
below:

@Andrew Cunningham @Tom Gewecke

Hi again. Thanks for clarifying about MKLC limitation, a whole year spewing
fire with this limitation not knowing it was a software limitation.

----------------

@Don

Hi Don, I saw the Konyin layout and it is excellent in many aspects,
nevertheless I don't think user behaviour makes it a successful
alternative. It still requires learning a new way of typing which although
easy it is a barrier in people's mind. And then there is a question of
having another keyboard when your computer already shipped with one.

It is one of those things that, as you highlight in your book, requires a
concerted effort from policymakers and manufacturers to make it the first
option every time one buys a computer in Nigeria for example so that it can
be successful. With regards to this keyboard in specific, there is an issue
of marketing and distribution as most of the people I talk to in Nigeria
either never heard of it or don't know where to buy it.

It seems that this initiative died out as the last we hear from the company
manufacturing those keyboards is in 2006 in disused forums and old posts.


-----------

@Andrew Cunningham @Ilya Zakharevich

>From memory this was a problem we would have with MS Word. Care needs to be
> taken selecting AltGr sequences to implement in keyboard.
> And adding frequently typed characters like vowels and tone marks to altgr
> is usually a bad idea. Easier to move less needed sequences to the altgr
> state putting feequently type characters on the normal and shift states


Hi Andrew, just a clarification there are pre-composed characters for
Nigerian languages which use letters with a dot below.

But with regards to the ALt-Gr, there it goes my innocence and feeling of
accomplishment :)), I had everything linked to the Alt-Gr key and did
exactly as Ilya said... MS Word is fine, but very specialised software such
as Photoshop are a pain as their power-user shortcuts all use ALT-Gr
indeed.

Although I will resort to Ilya's argument as far as I can, this is an issue
I must consider if I want to be inclusive or at least warn people using a
localised layout within an European keyboard.

------------

@Ilya Zakharevich

Many thanks for sharing your link at
http://search.cpan.org/~ilyaz/UI-KeyboardLayout/lib/UI/KeyboardLayout.pm.
Reading it avidly at the moment.

---------------

@Philippe Verdy

Perhaps Unicode could give Microsoft a gentle nudge in that direction, this
is the only free software I know so far.

-----------

#OCR #Tesseract

Actually, I am thinking a little bit bigger than my boots here, I am doing
all this work of compiling an accented glossary of words from existing
printed dictionaries so that I can help Adobe. Microsoft, Google and the
likes to speed up their language support for PDF and whichever technology
they have out there. I feel quite strongly that it is high time these were
niche solutions that require effort from ordinary people to implement and
became mainstream out-of-the-box solutions.

But from the content of what I just said above, you are right to assume I
have no clue how to get started, I am just a guy with a growing Excel
spreadsheet and a dwindling bank account as a result :).

------------

Many thanks to all of you! I still have questions with regards to a set of
binary Yorùbá characters/numbers system and will open a new discussion to
keep things well organised.

Regards,

Luis
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