Dear all, I am delighted with the amount of information you have kindly shared with me. I was watching the discussion as it evolved please see my comments as below:
@Andrew Cunningham @Tom Gewecke Hi again. Thanks for clarifying about MKLC limitation, a whole year spewing fire with this limitation not knowing it was a software limitation. ---------------- @Don Hi Don, I saw the Konyin layout and it is excellent in many aspects, nevertheless I don't think user behaviour makes it a successful alternative. It still requires learning a new way of typing which although easy it is a barrier in people's mind. And then there is a question of having another keyboard when your computer already shipped with one. It is one of those things that, as you highlight in your book, requires a concerted effort from policymakers and manufacturers to make it the first option every time one buys a computer in Nigeria for example so that it can be successful. With regards to this keyboard in specific, there is an issue of marketing and distribution as most of the people I talk to in Nigeria either never heard of it or don't know where to buy it. It seems that this initiative died out as the last we hear from the company manufacturing those keyboards is in 2006 in disused forums and old posts. ----------- @Andrew Cunningham @Ilya Zakharevich >From memory this was a problem we would have with MS Word. Care needs to be > taken selecting AltGr sequences to implement in keyboard. > And adding frequently typed characters like vowels and tone marks to altgr > is usually a bad idea. Easier to move less needed sequences to the altgr > state putting feequently type characters on the normal and shift states Hi Andrew, just a clarification there are pre-composed characters for Nigerian languages which use letters with a dot below. But with regards to the ALt-Gr, there it goes my innocence and feeling of accomplishment :)), I had everything linked to the Alt-Gr key and did exactly as Ilya said... MS Word is fine, but very specialised software such as Photoshop are a pain as their power-user shortcuts all use ALT-Gr indeed. Although I will resort to Ilya's argument as far as I can, this is an issue I must consider if I want to be inclusive or at least warn people using a localised layout within an European keyboard. ------------ @Ilya Zakharevich Many thanks for sharing your link at http://search.cpan.org/~ilyaz/UI-KeyboardLayout/lib/UI/KeyboardLayout.pm. Reading it avidly at the moment. --------------- @Philippe Verdy Perhaps Unicode could give Microsoft a gentle nudge in that direction, this is the only free software I know so far. ----------- #OCR #Tesseract Actually, I am thinking a little bit bigger than my boots here, I am doing all this work of compiling an accented glossary of words from existing printed dictionaries so that I can help Adobe. Microsoft, Google and the likes to speed up their language support for PDF and whichever technology they have out there. I feel quite strongly that it is high time these were niche solutions that require effort from ordinary people to implement and became mainstream out-of-the-box solutions. But from the content of what I just said above, you are right to assume I have no clue how to get started, I am just a guy with a growing Excel spreadsheet and a dwindling bank account as a result :). ------------ Many thanks to all of you! I still have questions with regards to a set of binary Yorùbá characters/numbers system and will open a new discussion to keep things well organised. Regards, Luis
