Thank you, Richard, for your feedback!
On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:40:59 -0400
> Ed Trager <ed.trager_at_gmail.com> 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.
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 23 2012 - 14:56:21 CDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Apr 23 2012 - 14:56:23 CDT