Hello, does anyone have an opinion on how GTK can be made accessible to keyboard-free input? Or should it not?
As a tablet user on LInux, I'm left with tricks and patching together something that somehow works. A.t.m. I'm using Cellwriter which has a try icon in Tint2 - every time I need to write something, I click the tray Icon. >From what I've gathered, Cellwriter's recognition provides a pluggable API, I'm therefore planning to write my own virtual keyboard (for Cellwriter's is less than rudimentary) and employ Cellwriter's recognition API. While this will hopefully yield a comfortable GTK onScreenKeyboard (minimalistic and functional, compared to solutions such as onBoard), it does not really solve the problem of how to invoke the tool. Windows 7 has a good implementation of keyboard-free entry, imho. Specifically, every input field, when accessed with either the pen or the finger, pops-up a small link to open either the OSK or the Handwriting-Recognizer (HWR). I hoped, something similar would be possible for Gtk/GNOME - it will have to be done sooner or later, tablets are taking a dominant market share and Android is not always an option. Similar to Windows, I thought, GTK could offer a tooltip-like link to bring up an OSK or HWR, depending on by which Input Device the mouse is currently moved. So if you click with the mouse into a GtkEntry, nothing happens. If you tap with the finger, a small icon allows you to bring up the OSK. If you click with the pen, a small icon allows you to bring up the HWR. Surely, this would have to be integral part of Gtk, would it not? I could not imagine how something could "plug into" Gtk (without the means of LD_PRELOAD or similar) do achieve that - it would instead have to be integrated into Gtk's Code. What about allowing a entry in /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini OnScreenKeyboard = /usr/bin/cellwriter -k %x %y HandwritingRecongizer = /usr/bin/cellwriter -h %x %y which determines which tooltips-links (if any) start which application? In detail (although this is just meant as a preliminary example), %x and %y would be replaced by the position of the GtkEntry on-screen (so that the OSK/HWR could place itsself next to the cursor). Other "parameters" could aswell be possible, such as "%s" which would pass the current value of the GtkEntry, etc. It shouldn't be difficult to implement that in Gtk - after all, there is only a limited number of GtkEditables. Do you have any ideas, suggestions, or objections? regards, Cedric _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
