On 02/22/2002 05:26:53 PM Yaap Raaf wrote:
>I've also been looking at Tavultesoft's Keyman, but there are no
>readymade keyboards available for the purpose. I don't know
>how complicated it is to develop one.
For simple behaviours, it can be quite easy; e.g. if you just need to
assign Devanagari characters to keys on a US keyboard without any
additional behaviour considerations, there's a wizard with a visual UI
that you can use. If you need, though, you can create fairly sophisticated
input methods. How difficult it is depends on how complex the required
behaviour is, but the learning curve is **far** less than learning to
program in C or to use the Windows DDK.
And I've never heard of anyone complaining that a Keyman input method
could not keep up with a user's typing speed.
BTW, Keyman 6 (in development) will support Microsoft's Text Services
Framework, and also (I think) rules that are sensitive to both preceding
and following context. That should make it possible to create fairly
polished text-editing user interfaces even for Indic scripts or Arabic,
where there are complex character/presentation relationships involved.
(E.g. I'd guess that Arabic users would find it less distracting if
characters appeared initially in non-final forms and only change to final
forms after a word-breaking or non-joining character has been entered. If
that's true, I can envision implementing that without too much difficulty
using Keyman.)
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Feb 23 2002 - 08:47:34 EST