[SCIM] The new features I'm implementing.

[Kenichi Handa]

I'm sorry for this very late response.

In article <419810A6.1080401 at tsinghua.org.cn>, James Su <suzhe at tsinghua.org.cn> writes:
>   It's good idea. I'm just wondering where I can find the commonly used 
> keyboard layouts information, including the mapping tables and pictures? 
> And how about user customized keyboard? And how can we know the 
> currently used keyboard layout? Because you know, not all FrontEnds can 
> get the hardware code of a key, we can only use the key symbols 
> generated by FrontEnds instead of hardware keycodes. So we are unable to 
> know the physical position of a key by its key symbol.

We can ask a user to specify which keyboard layout he is
using by showing several typical examples.  If there's no
matching one, we can show him a layout of non-labelled keys
and ask him to type a key while putting mouse cursor on each
key.  That way, we can know what key symbol is sent from
FontEnd by typing which location of key.  Further more, we
can ask him to send to us the information about the layout
created that way to augment our database of keyboard
layouts.  Yes, making such a GUI interface is not a pleasant
work, but I think it's quite useful.

In Emacs, I implemented something like that, but less
convenient way.  If you are interested in it, see the
section "Keyboard layout translation handlers" of
emcas/lisp/international/quail.el.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa at m17n.org