Re: Re: [AD] a small contribution

[Shawn Hargreaves <shawn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Pavlovic <pavlovic@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> At last I realized what it is. It is an accent, but not from the Slovak
> language, but from the Czech language. I could map it as a new accent, but 
> there is a new problem. KEY_TILDE should be a normal ASCII character, and 
> SHIFT+KEY_TILDE the accent key that awaits another keypress.

Urgh. The existing key mapping system certainly won't handle that.

I begin to think that there are so many differences and inconsistencies 
about how accent escapes are handled from one location to another, that it 
may not even be possible to just use a table driven system for them all: I 
have a feeling that some actual code might be the simplest way to handle 
some of these differences. Either that, or just a lot more special flags to 
set in keyconf for enabling different behaviours.

As an English speaker who doesn't even speak any other languages properly, 
I'm absolutely the wrong person to do anything about this, though. It would 
be possible to just add special flags for each new exception to the rules as 
we find them, but that could quickly balloon way out of proportion. I'm 
aware that already, most non-Latin languages have needed to compromise in 
some way to fit with the current system, and this can only get worse if we 
ever move on to things that aren't even based on the western alphabet. The 
ideal thing would be if someone could research into exactly how do keyboard 
mappings work in every part of the world, find the common patterns, and then 
redesign a more flexible system that would be a superset of all this. If 
anyone has the energy to do that, I'd be happy to put a day or two into 
implementing whatever methods you decide are needed, but I don't have the 
time to do all the research myself. Alternatively I suppose we could just 
patch specific cases as they are discovered, and hope that not too many more 
of these exceptions will show up later on :-)


--
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn@xxxxxxxxxx - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"A binary is barely software: it's more like hardware on a floppy disk."