[Localization] Status on SCIM

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 4:43 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> As a proof of concept, I wrote a XKB symbol file parser, and utilized
> that to generate m17n-db format .mim files from our previous XKB work
> which can be utilized both by SCIM and IBUS (if we decide to use IBUS
> at some point). The parser is horribly slow (it takes around 3 minutes
> to do a single conversion), and I believe it's my inexperience with
> pyparsing which is causing most of the slowness. However, it does seem
> to work, and I just did a test (not on an XO yet) with a converted
> Devanagari keyboard layout, and it seemed to work perfectly.
>
> Of course, one needs to tweak the output manually at times, but most
> of the grunt work of figuring out the mappings will be done by the
> script. For the Devanagari IM, the mapping did not require any manual
> changes.
>
> I'll check out fancy stuff like Alt-Gr mapping, etc tomorrow and let
> you know how it works.
>
> If anyone is interested, the tool can be checked out with
>
> git-clone git://dev.laptop.org/users/sayamindu/xkb2scim
>
> Invoke the script like:
>
> python parse_xkb_symbols.py hi olpc > hi.mim
>
> It's a quick and ugly hack, with some obvious areas of improvement so
> patches are most welcome ;-)
>

I tweaked the script a bit more, and it is significantly faster (the
results are returned in seconds, rather than in minutes). The relevant
changes are already in git.
I also figured out a way to make Alt-gr work (just got the Mongolian
keyboard ported to m17n tables with zero manual intervention). The
script needs some tweaking for those, and a few corner cases need to
be handled correctly. I'll do some more testing and keep the list
informed about my results.
Cheers,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]