[OLPC New Zealand] Māori Macrons & olpc keyboard

[Walter Bender]

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.

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 ā
> 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.
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org