#6568 NORM Never A: Khmer Cambodian keyboard is deficient

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#6568: Khmer Cambodian keyboard is deficient
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 Reporter:  Mokurai           |       Owner:  sayamindu     
     Type:  enhancement       |      Status:  new           
 Priority:  normal            |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
Component:  localization      |     Version:                
 Keywords:  Khmer, SCIM, IME  |    Verified:  0             
 Blocking:                    |   Blockedby:                
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 Reply by Mokurai

 On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 6:14 PM, Javier SOLA <javier at khmeros.info> wrote:
 > Walter Bender wrote
 >
 > >> There is a government standard Unicode keyboard...
 >  >
 >  > Can you please send me a pointer to this? (I am by default using the
 >  > standard layout defined by the XKB symbol table that is standard with
 >  > Linux, but as you note, it seems suboptimal.)
 >  >
 >  I am afraid it is the same. There are vowels that Unicode refused to
 >  include in the table, because they could be constructed with two code
 >  points, but they are quite used standard vowels, and it does not make
 >  sense not to have them in the keyboard. Technology has to solve the
 problem.

 This decision on the part of character set experts and linguists in the
 Unicode Consortium was quite correct. Unicode encodes characters, not
 glyphs, and certainly not keystrokes. It is not the fault of Unicode that
 almost all software developers used to work in broken software models for
 character handling, including one byte per character and one character per
 keystroke.

 It is of course possible to type correct Yoruba and correct Khmer on one-
 code-point-per-keystroke keyboards, just as it is possible to type
 accented European letters on keyboards that do not have all of them. Thus
 compose, `, o creates ò on the US International keyboard for Linux and on
 other layouts such as Dvorak. 'Ò' is used in Kreyòl (Haitian Creole
 French), which we are currently localizing to. Possible, but not always
 appropriate.

 The correct solution for Khmer is to create a Khmer IME for SCIM (Smart
 Common Input Method), which will be standard on XOs. IMEs can take in more
 than one keystroke to choose a character, as for syllabic writing systems
 (Ethiopian, Japanese kana, and others) or logographic writing systems
 (Chinese, Yi, Mayan, and others), and can generate more than one Unicode
 code point per keystroke, as is required by standard keyboards for Yoruba
 and other languages.

 See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/SCIM

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Ticket URL: <http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6568>
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