Status of Ethiopian support

[Bernardo Innocenti]

I'm adding Jonathan Kew, Lidet Tilahun and Daniel Yacob on
Cc and quoting everything because the topic may be of
interest to them.


On 09/12/07 04:26, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:

>>    Sergey's Compose file for am_ET is already upstream, and it
>>    is required for XIM-baded composition to work in all applications.
> This is the quesion #1 - does OLPC have requirement for Ethiopean to
> work in non-gtk apps? Are there such apps/activities in the standard
> image?

There's at least etoys.  And I don't know if xulrunner can be me
made to use GTK IM's.


>>    AI: Sergey said he'll check if CONSONANT+VOWEL is possible
>>    with XIM.
> I see two options here:
> 1. The current one, when "dead" character is vowel. In that case, it
> only works as "VOWEL+CONSONANT".
> 2. We can make CONSONANT "dead" characters, but in that case entering
> CONSONANT itself would require either two presses of the consonant -
> or simply disabling XIM.
> 
> Which way would you prefer?

This would be a good question for Lidet.


>>    GTK contains an Amharic input method which is currently outdated.
>>    I'm in contact with the author, Daniel Yacob, who'll soon port
>>    his latest patch to the current version of GTK.
>>    This probably means we'll have to fork the gtk2 package too.
>>    I'm unable to tell how important these changes would be for users.
> The important question - is that GTK IM using same layout/set of
> compose rules (just with reverted CONSONANT+VOWEL composition) as XIM?
> Are we working off the same standard?

I'm afraid there are differences.  Yacob?


>>    Additionally, it seems this IM requires the "us" keyboard.
>>    I couldn't get it to work with the "et" keyboard loaded.
>>    Daniel says it shouldn't happen.
> It is no wonder IMHO, because it is using ASCII characters produced by
> 'us' XKB layout. Since 'et' layout produces unicode characters, the
> "left part" of the composition rules does not work. See the
> composition rules here:
> http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/gtk%2B/trunk/modules/input/imam-et.c?revision=11895&view=markup

I think the GTK IM should be using the raw keycodes instead.
Yacob, what do you think?

-- 
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 |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
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