[OLPC India] Devanagari Effort

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi Manusheel,
The characters on 5,6,7,8 according to Inscript are not base characters,
and hence to make them work, you will have to figure out a way to have
multiple character output for a single XKB symbol table entry. We had
tried that a few years back, and we couldn't get it to work at that
time. I'm not very sure if it can be done now.
I'm not very familiar with all the languages that use the Devanagari
script, so I'm not sure how frequently these characters occur in a these
languages. If they are not very frequent, I don't think it's worth the
effort to include them in the (physical) keyboard.

Regards,
Sayamindu

 
On Tue, 2007-10-16 at 02:16 +0530, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
> Sayamindu,
>  
> Thanks for all your pointers till date. We appreciate your feedback.
>  
> We are in the process of finding the Unicode definitions for the
> characters on the 5,6,7, and 8 keys. Your help in this aspect will be
> highly appreciated.
>  
> Regards,
> Manu
>  
> Manusheel Gupta
> One Laptop Per Child Inc.
> http://laptop.org 
>  
>  
> 
>  
>  
> 
> 
>  
> On 10/15/07, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote: 
>         
>         On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 01:20 +0530, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
>         > Sayamindu/Joshua,
>         >
>         > We appreciate your suggestions/feedback. 
>         >
>         > We are in the process of taking a decision to figure out the
>         best-fit
>         > solution to position characters on the keycaps.
>         >
>         > There are several classes of choices to make:
>         >
>         > (A) Keep everything aligned horizontally and vertically or
>         introduce 
>         > an offset that will allow for larger glyphs.
>         >
>         > (B) Always vertically align to the horizontal stroke of the
>         character,
>         > leaving space above the stroke for those characters that
>         have marks
>         >      above or make a slight modification by sliding the
>         character up 
>         > vertically when there is no mark, again making it possible
>         to use
>         > larger
>         >      glyphs.
>         >
>         >
>         
>         I had a look at
>         http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Devanagari_Keyboard and
>         http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Devi1.png (vertical alignment,
>         no
>         horizontal alignment) seemed to be the most visually appealing
>         to me.
>         
>         However, this kind of glyph alignment may be difficult to
>         implement in 
>         certain cases (eg: what if character aa, U0906 needs to be
>         combined with
>         vowel sign ii, U0940 ?)
>         
>         Between horizontal and vertical alignment (or no alignment
>         all), I would
>         suggest that more importance be given to vertical alignment,
>         since our 
>         writing system makes to mandatory to align all our glyphs in
>         line with
>         the top horizontal bar present in most of the characters.
>         
>         In such a situation, http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Devi3.png
>         is should
>         be avoided http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Image:Devi2.png seems to
>         be the
>         safest option.
>         
>         
>         Warm regards,
>         Sayamindu
>         
>         
>         --
>         Sayamindu Dasgupta 
>         http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings
>         
> 
-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings