Switching between Arabic and French

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Tuesday 18 March 2008 7:44:00 am Walter Bender wrote:
> While the laptop can readily switch between up to four keyboard
> mappings at a time, the physical keyboard is probably only capable of
> supporting two sets of glyphs. We've opted to date to put Latin and
> one other set per keyboard. Any other ideas more than welcome.
Soft keyboards are a better option for multilingual text. Kids seem to prefer 
controlling shapes on the screen using the pointer (mouse). Having to switch 
attention between screen and keyboard can be quite distracting.

A low-effort soft keyboard could store pictures corresponding to each language 
layout and cycle thru them using the lang key (somewhat like using ALT+TAB to 
cycle thru desktop windows on PCs). Have the kid either press a key or click 
on a softkey using the pointer to dismiss the picture. After some time, kids 
will be able to memorize the layout and won't need the picture prompt.

Just an idea,
Subbu