Peter,
>I wasn't thinking of someone using multiple hardware keyboards. Would
anyone want
>to switch from one language to another by shuffling physical keyboards on
their
>desktop? I don't know.
If you can not touch type in the language it is useful to have a keyboard
with the appropriate key caps.
>The USB standard supports language IDs? Where can I find out more about
that?
I looked at the standard when it came out to see what of the i18n proposals
that I made for ACCESS.bus were carried over. I think they had assigned
20-30 languages.
>>I am not clever enough to figure out how to
>>encode 6700 language in 8 bits.
>Certainly not at once!
The idea is that you burn in an ID the represent the keyboard layout
limiting the potential number of layouts to 256. The USB driver will see
that it is a keyboard and then check the language and know how to map the
key codes which represent the physical key position on the keyboard the key
assignment as represented by the key cap. All keyboards send codes that
represent the key press / key release. The driver maps these into
characters in whatever code page the driver uses or Unicode.
The ID represent the key caps assignments for the physical keyboard it is
not dynamic.
>I convinced myself recently that specifying keyboard layouts needs to be
done in terms
>of identifier pairs: one ID to specify a language/writing-system-encoding
>(e.g. Azerbaijani in Cyrillic Unicode vs. Azerbaijani in Roman Unicode)
>together with a particular keyboard layout (where a given layout determines
>a mapping from keystroke sequences to codepoints, and might possibly be
used
>for more than one writing system).
The system the I developed for ACCESS.bus had a main keyboard layout. This
would be French AZERTY, French Swiss, French Canadian, Russian, Russian
homophonic, etc. This whold be like a script designation for fonts. The
next part would be the numeric pad layout. Finally would be the
system/function/ime/control key layout. Some key mappings would depend on
the OS use.
Many Japanese systems use the US keyboards that does not make them Japanese.
On the other hand if you have a Japanese thumb shift keyboard it will not
only have different language mapping but a very different set of system
keys. The driver not only has to decode the key states but the thumb shifts
must be timed.
Carl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Oct 03 2001 - 23:09:46 EDT