Re: [OLPC New Zealand] Māori Macrons & olpc keyboard

Jerry Vonau jerry at laptop.org.au
Mon Jun 24 08:12:05 EDT 2013


On 24 June 2013 06:43, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:

> Which build are you running? In the latest Sugar builds, there is a
> keyboard settings control panel section. We could probably backport it
> to your build if it is reasonably recent.
>
>
In OLPC's & Dextrose's versions of sugar the sugar-cp-keyboard rpm doesn't
get installed. Think there is a conflict over the keyboard with
olpc-configure supplied by olpc-utils.

Jerry


> Meanwhile, we may have to make a new X keyboard symbols file for you
> that does the right thing. Not impossible to get upstreamed.
>
> regards.
>
> -walter
>
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Tom Parker <tom at carrott.org> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm looking at how you enter a macron for Māori language users.
> >
> > It seems that the olpc us international keyboard binds a ̄  COMBINING
> MACRON
> > (unicode U+0304) to algr + hyphan. When typed after the letter a you get
>> > which is similar to but not the same as ā LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH
> MACRON
> > (unicode U+0101).
> >
> > Issues I've noted with a small amount of testing:
> >
> > On older builds, Write does not correctly load files containing the
> > combining macron.
> > The combining macron is not rendered at the correct height for lower case
> > letters. (on older builds this seems to be the case all the time, on
> newer
> > builds, it is rendered correctly after loading a file until you delete a
> > following character the on the same line, then it jumps up)
> > You can have more than one combining macron, they stack.
> > You have to delete twice, once to delete the macron and again to delete
> the
> > character.
> >
> > Have these issues come up before? I don't see any. I will raise tickets
> for
> > the bugs rendering the macron in the latest version of write shortly. I'm
> > not sure if anyone wants a ticket for older builds? Obviously stacking
> > macrons is by-design when using the combining macron character (see
> > https://twitter.com/glitchr_/ for more improbable outcomes of combining
> > characters, perhaps your browser will crash).
> >
> > I haven't yet experimented with entering the ā U+0101 characters into
> sugar
> > (tomorrow!)
> >
> > Apparently on Windows, the Māori keyboard is set up such that when you
> hit
> > the grave (apparently this is what I have always called the backtick) key
> > and then one of the vowels, you get the macron version of the vowel. I
> > haven't seen this in action but Māori typists claim it is very efficient.
> >
> > Gnome on Ubuntu on my laptop binds right-alt-a to ā U+0101 when using the
> > Māori keyboard layout. I'm not sure how Maori typists feel about this
> > inconsistency with windows.
> >
> > When you choose the language in sugar, can this change the keyboard
> layout
> > too? If not, what is the recommended way to configure this?
> >
> > How complex is it to change the localization of the keyboard for the
> Maori
> > language? The xkb files don't look too complicated. Is the grave - vowel
> =
> > macron vowel possible while still preserving the backtick for shell
> > scripting? I haven't seen the laptops in question but I'm told they have
> the
> > Australian simplified key caps, so changing the existing alt-gr mappings
> to
> > render macron vowels (ie to mimic the Maori keyboard option on
> Gnome-Ubuntu)
> > instead of the existing mappings won't confuse the key caps.
> >
> > Obviously touching all the laptops to change how the keyboard works is a
> > pain and the change is potentially erased by future updates.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Devel mailing list
> > Devel at lists.laptop.org
> > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>
>
>
> --
> Walter Bender
> Sugar Labs
> http://www.sugarlabs.org
> _______________________________________________
> OLPC-NZ mailing list
> OLPC-NZ at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/olpc-nz
>
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