Re: Noticed in passing

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74 gmx net>]

On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 09:43 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> While testing FC6 test1 I noticed that the
> keyboard layout indicator applet has several
> "interesting" menu items. 

Normally you would expect the installer to setup the "proper" menu items
on installation, depending on the locale.
If an end-user wants to setup a new keyboard layout, she would try
something like

> The first one is "Layout view", which seems to
> be intended to bring up an image of the keyboard
> that is right in front of me, which would be of
> somewhat dubious value even if it worked. Unfortunately,
> it just shows an empty window with Help and Close
> buttons for me (may just be rawhide breakage, though...)

The Layout View shows a keyboard where you can press keys and have the
corresponding key on the image highlighted. Helpful if you want to
figure out what keys are available.
You can also view what characters are printed for the current keyboard
layout.
The layout view looks like
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=68424&action=view

It appears that there is some issue with rawhide.

> The second one is "Plugins". WTF ? How in the world
> does a keyboard layout indicator need a plugin system ?!
> And why go to all the length of adding a plugin framework
> when there are no plugins after all ? This looks
> like first-grade overengineering to me.

I am not sure what functionality the plugins are intended for.

There is a scheduled IRC session on #xkbconfig, today Friday at 19:00
GMT.
See the agenda at
https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=19873264&forum_id=43694
Probably the discussion will be repeated during this weekend at a
reasonable time for Asia/Australia.

Apart from the technical details of gswitchit there will be a discussion
about possible integration of the SCIM functionality. The plan is that
if all of these make sense, there will be a need for the usability
people to help out design better the interface of the keyboard indicator
(and Keyboard applet in Control center).

I am not sure what Fedora uses for complex input methods. Does it use
SCIM or IIIMF or something else?


The intended way to use the keyboard indicator is along the lines of
http://www.gnome.gr/writing/

See also 
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper#How_to_add_keyboard_layouts_for_other_languages
and the following 4 answers for more details.

Simos