[Fwd: Status of Ethiopian support]

[Sergey Udaltsov]

Hello Bernardo,

Thanks for the report.

>    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?

>    Furthermore, the Compose works by pressing a vowel, followed
>    by a consonant, which seems to be a less convenient way
>    of producing glyphs (see below)
>
>    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?

>    GTK contains an Amharic input method which is currently outdated.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?

>    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

Cheers,

Sergey