Version: (using KDE KDE 3.5.0) Some Asian languages do NOT have latin/greek derived alphabets. These DONT have a concept of uppercase/ lowercase alphabets either. As the number of alphabets can be more than 26 (typically around 50), the keyboards for such languages are very complex and ktouch can be very valuable in learning typing for these. However, ktouch by design, ASSUMES a western language. For instance, I tried developing some keyboard setups for Hindi (an Indian language). However ktouch was able to display only the "normal" (without shift) characters. So, it would prompt a user to type a certain key, but the highlighted key is not the same as whats displayed. e.g. For a language with no concept of uppercase, key "a" might be alphabet x, uppercase "A" might be a totally unrelated alphbet y. (I am using latin alphabets x and y to illustrate the problem here, in reality these would be some unicode characters from the target language) for the practice text of "xy" in this langauge, user needs to type the following keystrokes - a, Shift + a. ktouch would keep on only displaying 'a', and keeps prompting the user for typing 'a' again. Please enhance ktouch to 1) Prompt for Shift or any such "modifier key" correctly. (there could be more than one, eg. Alt+shift etc defined in the xkb layout) 2) upon pressing and holding the "modifer key", e.g. Shift or Caps-Lock, ktouch should change the lay-out display on the keyboard map appropriately. i.e., in the example given above, upon pressing Shift, ktouch screen should display the alphabet "y".
Interesting suggestions, I will incorporate them into the new concept for the reworked keyboard drawing engine for the next major release version.
Hi Andreas, Thanks for your reply. I had developed a quick (javascript based) keyboard tutor which stores upto 4 unicode charaters per key, and prompts for the appropriate modifier, (0= no modifier, 1=Shift, 2=Alt Gr, 3= AltGr + Shift) depending on the index of the next character from the lession. Let me know if you want to have a look at it, it is not at a "fully finished" state, but serves well to illustrate what might be really handy for many languages. Cheers, Vivek On 5 Apr 2006 05:03:26 -0000, Andreas Nicolai <Andreas.Nicolai@gmx.net> wrote: [bugs.kde.org quoted mail]
This sounds like something I had in mind for the new keyboard engine. Currently two design are proposed: 1. whenever a modifier key is pressed, the keyboard shows only the accessible characters 2. the keyboard shows all characters always (like in the Bangla keyboard) but highlights the currently active keys (with a colored shadow or something like that) Looking from the "character to type" point of view, each character would require knowledge of necessary modifier keys. That's at least how far I got in the design process. I'll keep you updated...
Fixed in version 2.0.0: no special rules for shift keys anymore: instead all characters on key indicate their associated modifiers.