Hi all Short summary: I see a problem with combining several layouts in the way "encouraged by XKB. An example to that problem is the question: how do I create a layout of "English(US)+Romanian+Hungarian"
standard keyboard mappers (e.g: KDE's kxkb, window's internat) show a configuration interface of a list of available keyboard layout, and allow you to choose a number of them. "XKB tools" (e.g. setxkbmap) are different. They assume that most people want to use only English, or only English and one extra language. They require a special configuration file not for every 'layout', but for every 'combination of layouts'. The gain from this approach is that switching between "layouts" is very flexible. I wish I could switch to a different layout by holding the right-alt key like I currently can on X (I can also switch permanently). The way I see it there are two problems: 1. XKB has a limitation of only 4 groups active simultaneously: This is not a problem for most people, but many some of the people on this list are ones of the extreme cases, who would have rather had more than layouts. Does anybody think that this is a terrible limitation with which we can't live in the long run and we should try to build a better protocol? I'm not sure if building such a better protocol is possible, feasible, and a good idea generally. For the rest of this post I will assume that we live with the limitation of 4 groups. 2. Currently layouts are not easily composed together: Suppose I want to have a English-Hebrew-Arabic layout. I demonstrated a while ago that doing so is possible by slightly stretching the current framework. E.g: writing a keyboard mapper that will create layouts on-the-fly can work. Such a keyboard mapper will not be able to work through setxkbmap, and will have to work with xkbcomp directly. I can also imagine some changes to the way setxkbmap works (or maybe writing an "extended-setxkbmap" that will allow such trivial compositions, provided that symbol files are slightly modified. But such approaches have to face another issue: Suppose I want to have a "English(US)-Romanian-Hungarian" layout. How do I map this into groups? (Note: I don't know European layouts too well. What I mean is two layouts that each of which is currently mapped into two groups) Note that today kxkb works by changing the whole keyboard mapping on every "layout" switch. This means that changing a layout requires a whole stream of events, instead of just 1 event. Therefore it is inherently slow. -- Tzafrir Cohen /"\ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign Taub 229, 972-4-829-3942, X Against HTML Mail http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir / \ _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
