[Localization] Keyboard switching

Fri Nov 23 23:43:33 EST 2007

On Nov 23, 2007 4:22 PM, Bernardo Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> On 11/23/07 17:32, Edward Cherlin wrote:
> > On Nov 23, 2007 3:38 AM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I know how to switch the console keyboard, and how to use SCIM for IME
> >> switching, but how does one switch the X keyboard? I haven't found
> >> this information on the Wiki.
>
> > I thank the people who pointed to the explanation of editing xorg.conf
> > to enable switching layouts via the keyboard. The answer I was looking
> > for, however, is that one can use setxkbmap from the Developer Console
> > to access any layout, whether switching to it is enabled in xorg.conf
> > or not.
>
> Also note that the mechanism for configuring keyboards
> has recently changed in joyride (and Update1 has part of
> this work).
>
> The new scheme is described here:
>    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Olpc-utils

Thank you.

> Blame me if you don't like it :-)

So right now there is no way to modify xorg.conf, but it will be set
correctly for one or two languages required in the target country. OK.
I don't need it. I'll change where I discussed this in the Wiki. You
will need to allow for countries that use three or more scripts
routinely, for students of history, religion, and other subjects
involving historical source documents, and especially for students of
languages.

> > This is still not adequate for creating multilingual or even bilingual
> > documents, which our students will need to do with great frequency.
>
> What would you require?  I've been doing some i18n work,
> but I received very little feedback so far from actual
> bilingual users.

I'm multilingual. Bilingual is good, but not sufficient. Most people
seem to think that one local language plus English is sufficient, but
in most countries it isn't. For language students, the situation is
worse yet.

Rwanda needs at least Kinyarwanda, French, and English (all Latin
alphabet, so all manageable from one international keyboard layout.)

Mongolia would like traditional Mongol alphabet, Cyrillic, and Latin,
and possibly Chinese. Certainly if we include Inner Mongolia. Plus
Buddhist languages, including Sanskrit and Tibetan.

Afghanistan would like its own languages (Dari, Pashto, Hazaragi,
maybe Aimaq, all written in Arabic script), plus Farsi and Urdu (also
Arabic script) and English. Plus scriptural Arabic. And a bit of
Tajik, Uzbek, and others, in Cyrillic, Latin, and occasionally other
writing systems.

Nigeria needs Hausa (Arabic and Latin script), Yorùbá, and Igbo.
International European doesn't cut it for multiply-accented letters.

Cambodia needs Khmer, French, and English.

India isn't looking like a candidate for the laptop, but it has more
than 20 official languages in 10 different writing systems.

China has more than 50 legally-recognized minorities, several with
their own writing systems (Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur, Yi).

Almost all countries in sub-Saharan Africa have significant Indian
minorities, and most are doing business with China at an increasing
rate.

The US has a requirement for Cherokee, Canadian Aboriginal Syillabics,
and a host of immigrant languages.

Every country needs people who speak, read, and write the major world
languages, including those of the traditional European powers from
Portugal to Russia, plus at least Arabic, maybe Farsi, certainly
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. People all over Asia and the Pacific
learn Korean in order to attend Korean colleges and universities.

> At this time, I believe we're *not* planning a GUI to let the
> user easily customize the keyboard layout and add multiple
> keyboards.

I have on occasion had more than a dozen keyboards and IMEs in use,
when working on Unicode issues and wide-ranging localization projects.
There are about 30 writing systems in major modern use, and at one
time or another I have had all of them in use except Mongolian, which
isn't properly available yet. I'm not typical, but there are others
like me in every country. Particularly among students of various
religions, linguists, and some other specialists.

Judaism requires Hebrew and Aramaic, and in some circles Yiddish, plus
in many cases Russian, English, and other languages.

Christianity requires Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek for the Bible
sources, plus at least Latin for Catholics and a local language for
many of the Orthodox--Armenian, Georgian, Russian, etc.

Hinduism can get by with just Sanskrit, but Sanskrit has been written
in several dozen writing systems over the last few thousand years.

Buddhism is a particular problem. Pali in eight scripts, Sanskrit,
Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean for source
documents, and more.

> We are also concerned that some kids could effectively make
> the laptop unusable by setting some fancy keyboard, so for
> now we keep the keyboard configuration away from the user's
> home directory and don't document how to override it in the
> user's home.

You can't prevent it. I and a lot of people are going to change
keyboards in the Developer Console if you don't give us a GUI method,
and some of us are going to make our own layouts. Security through
obscurity is busted. Document the proper methods for doing it, and how
to fix it when it goes wrong. In any event, there has to be a way to
restore a broken installation no matter what the cause.

Anyway, it isn't a problem of any frequency in Gnome or KDE, so I
don't think you should borrow trouble.

> To make things like this safe, maybe we should have a
> "reset to defaults" cheat code such as keeping one key
> pressed while the system is starting up.

> It would be quite easy to implement: just remove the
> ~olpc/.olpc-configured file so that olpc-configure will
> run again.

Rename, don't delete. People need all the pieces of the puzzle when debugging.

We would probably do better to design a way of recovering from the
full range of possible faults, not just one at a time.

> Thoughts?

Yes. I recommend that everyone involved in localization read the
introductory material in The Unicode Standard, version 5.0, and glance
through the charts, and browse at Ethnologue for information on
numbers of speakers of languages by country. Just so you know what
there is to know when you need it.

http://www.unicode.org/
http://www.ethnologue.org/

You don't need to know all of this, but you need to know it exists.
Then ask people who know more than that about their own country's
requirements whenever the occasion arises. I can introduce you to some
of them.

> --
>  \___/
>  |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
>   \___\  One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/
>

-- 
Edward Cherlin
Earth Treasury: End Poverty at a Profit
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Earth_Treasury
Sustainable MBA student
Presidio School of Management