Talk:Keyboard design

Keyboard Back-light and Illumination

It seems to me that this laptop might need to work sometimes in low lighting. It would be good to possibly turn on a back-light under the keyboard. It sounds easy to have translucent rubber so the light shows through to help see keys. --imajeff 2006-04-10

Or possibly another idea for enabling users to type in the dark would be to have a on-screen guide, showing the actual keyboard layouts that they are typing on. This is all aimed at getting the users who may not have access to extensive lighting and electricity at home up-to-speed with using the keyboard layout as quickly possible, even if this is at home in the late evening.

(section as suggested in http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/User_talk:Imajeff even though the section above on Keyboard Back-light was noticed after that suggestion was made. The thing is, I thought that "Illuminating the keyboard" is a good idea, yet I thought that it meant a light onto the keys rather than a light under translucent keys, which is also a good idea.)

Our current plan is to have a light in the bezel that can illuminate the keyboard. Walter 21:13, 4 July 2006 (EDT)

Keyboard layouts and requirements of keys

Currently, there are keyboard layouts in Xorg that require a right Alt key (the AltGr one). These keyboard layouts define characters when you press AltGr and a letter. With only one Alt key this would need some rethinking.

In addition, Xorg (XKB) allows to use a Compose key (Multi Key) to enter special characters. If you use GNOME, enable the Compose key in order to write extra Unicode characters. Usually, users set the Win key to be this Compose key. On the OLPC, will there be a spare key that can have the role of the Compose key?

With the compose key you can create universal keyboard sequences and type interesting characters such as ☗☻☎☪♜⚈⚉⚖⚄⚅♥♦♣☻☭☬. For example, you can make a sequence that the child types Compose : - ) and gets ☻. It's much better than using bitmap images. --Simosx 15:08, 10 July 2006 (EDT)