Languages, countries
April 21, 2008 11:30 am g-c-c, libxklavier, xkeyboard-configFor some while, I was being asked why layouts are organized on per country basis. Now, it is time to stop these discussions. I made a large commit to xkeyboard-config, putting loads of ISO (639-2/3166) codes into base.xml.in. So, when next release is out, layouts and variants can be selected by either country or language – whatever is best for the user. Now, I have a request to everyone reading this blog – could you please look at the resulting file and check whether your layouts/variants are listed with proper country/language (please keep in mind – the attributes of a variant are inherited from the enclosing layout, unless explicitly overridden).
The code in libxklavier to support this information is committed (though, some more functions are planned). The gnome-keyboard-properties capplet will benefit of it soon – the code is not in SVN yet, but at least you can look at the screenshot:
The size of the font reflects the number of layouts/variants available for the language.
April 21st, 2008 at 1:46 pm
It’s great somebody want’s to tackle the mess of X11 and keyboards :).
Changing font size based probably violate accessability. Just a guess thought.
Also, Since you need to describe what it means (from description of screenshot) – then it’s probably a bad visualization for an interactive GUI. It’s not a data plot with legends ;).
April 21st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Frej: I am not big in HIG intepretation – so hopefully I’ll get some kicks if I really violate accessibility.
I agree with your point regarding “need to describe means bad visualization” – but I don’t have any better idea. What I want is more popular languages to appear first (and people not asking question “Why is English before Albanian?”)
April 21st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Why not use the DB in iso-codes instead? Works for Totem, epiphany, thoggen, etc.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I have not followed this project, but
i took a peek at the XML file, and
i see that French is listed as a variant
in the Canada entry. I am not sure if you mean French as in France layout or French as in French Canadian layout.
In France, they use an “AZERTY” layout
that is not in use in Canada. We use
different “QUERTY” layouts modified
with accentuated letters, some with
dead keys and some without.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Bastien, I AM using really iso-codes for translation of ISO codes to textual descriptions (one of the last commits to g-c-c introduced that dependency)! But the layout names are not always just language/country names.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Eric, “French as in French Canadian layout.”
April 21st, 2008 at 3:15 pm
I don’t see why you would want to sort the list other than alphabetically. There is no good reason to have English before Albanian and it certainly makes it a lot more difficult to locate the entry that one is looking for.
April 21st, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Sven, I am trying to make “popular choices” fast for users. The list is large enough… Within same group (by popularity) countries are sorted alphabetically
April 21st, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Agrrrr! perfect timing – KDE 4.1 just today went into soft feature freeze so I can’t add support for this… :-[
Tell me you announced today because you knew!! 🙂
April 21st, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Andry, be cool, it is really too early for anything close to production:) You’ll have to wait till new xk-c, new libxklavier…
April 21st, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Sergey, no problem, I am just kiddin’ 🙂
April 21st, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Hooray! I’m famous now, thanks to Sergey’s passion to screenshots 🙂
April 21st, 2008 at 8:15 pm
How does one choose the en_GB (international) layout via the new language selection?
Choose English and then two sets of variants … ?
April 21st, 2008 at 9:13 pm
John: yes, he chooses English language, then he sees all possible variants (UK, US, NZ, AU, IE, ZA,…)