Talk:OLPC Amharic Keyboard
There has been some questions as to why the typing in the Amharic XO keyboard is reverse of normal. I sent a mail on this, which should explain the issue: Sayamindu
Hi, I thought I would explain the issues we are having with the Amharic keyboard in details, so that interested people in the techteam are aware of what is happening. (please note that the design and the decisions with respect to the Ethiopian keyboard was taken much before I came into the scene, and there might be even better reasons for going with the current system, which I am not aware of) Each symbol in the Amharic script is a consonant vowel combination. For example, the Amharic equivalent of 'r' has nine forms, depending on the vowel that combines with it. The table below shows the various forms, and the first row has the vowel modifier which is applied to get the corresponding form. In case you are wondering, 'ə' represents the reduced vowel 'a' (as in 'above'), and ɨ represents the reduced vowel 'e' (as in 'business') ə u i a e ɨ o wa jə ረ ሩ ሪ ራ ሬ ር ሮ ሯ ፘ Now let us try to figure out how we can get this written on a normal qwerty keyboard with our existing XKB based keyboard input framework. Option 1: Use of the "Multi Key" This lets us write in the requisite order: The user has to press something called a "multi key" (which can be, and is usually mapped to the right Alt key), then press the sequence r, u to get the character on the second column (ሩ). However, in that case, almost each and every character will have to be written using the Multi key being pressed. This means the user will have to type in a really awkward way (imagine having no caps lock and trying to type a whole school assignment in all caps). Not a nice option. Option 2: Using the correct phonetic way This is the ideal solution. The compose tables are created such that r followed by u will give ሩ. However, in our current input method, the first item in a compose table entry is automatically treated as a dead character or a modifier (which means it cannot have an independent existence). However, the problem in such a situation, that according to our keyboard, 'r' is already mapped to ረ. Which means as a result, ረ becomes a dead character abd ceases to have an independent existence, and you cannot type it in unless a vowel follows it. So doing this is not possible. Option 3: Reversing the order If you look at the Ethiopian keyboard layout at http://wiki.laptop.org/images/8/8f/Ethiopic-B3.png, you will notice that the vowels (and a few others) are left blank in the Ethiopian mode. This means that we do not need them to produce anything useful (as standalone keys) while in Ethiopian mode. So, the solution that was adopted involved treating the vowels as modifiers [1], and hence we have the compose mapping where the vowels come first. Thus the reverse order. In fact, this is how it is done in upstream Xorg as well. So, how does SCIM become useful here ? Among various other things, SCIM has the ability to look at the characters surrounding a particular character to decide the ultimate form of a character. So if ረ is followed by u, it will replace ረ by ሩ. However, if ረ is followed by ለ (the equivalent of 'l+ə'), ረ is kept unchanged. Hopefully I managed to explain the situation without too much confusion ;-). This also underlines the fact why we should really move to SCIM in 9.1. As I have said before we hit almost the limits of what we can achieve with XKB with Amharic, and it would be impossible to handle even more complicated scripts unless we shift to SCIM (or any equivalent). Thanks, Sayamindu [1] This messed up our English keyboard (as Compose tables are loaded on the basis of locales), and vowels on the English keyboard stopped working. As a result, we have had to do even more hacks to get the keyboard working properly, and I'm currently interacting with the upstream Xorg developers on how to handle this properly.
