[sugar] [Localization] keyboard bindings for buttons and palettes

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Slightly out of context - but I think the information might be relevant here:

The Indic translation teams (mostly the Indian teams) have
traditionally kept accelerators unchanged, even if they had the option
of translating them. I do not know the exact reasons the other teams
had, but as far as the Bengali team was concerned, the three main
reasons were

1. Difficulty in maintaining consistency of keyboard shortcuts
(different translators used different acclerator for the same menu
item in different applications, leading to confusion and chaos)
2. Lack of native language keyboards (we have very few physical
"Bengali" keyboards with actual Bengali alphabets on them)
3. People are too much used to hitting Ctrl-S to save files - it's a
habit we decided not to mess with.

I guess 2 and 3 does not apply to the OLPC much.
Thanks,
Sayamindu

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 7:16 PM, Alexander Dupuy <alex.dupuy at mac.com> wrote:
> Tomeu Vizoso asks:
>
> > Users will switch keyboard layouts frequently? Cannot we just
>  > translate shortcuts to other characters in the cyrillic or arabic
>  > Layouts so they are used similarly to the latin one?
>
>  I'm not talking about switching keyboard layouts (e.g. using sugar-control-panel) but rather keyboards where the same keycap has both Latin and Cyrillic/Arabic/Nepali/etc. letters - switching between the two alphabets is done with the key under Enter that has multiply and divide sign in the English layout. Users will mostly work with their native alphabet, but will switch to Latin mode occasionally to type foreign names or terms in Latin script, e.g. XO, Cambridge, Negroponte, and bilingual users may switch for much more extended periods.
>
>  At a minimum, accelerators should work in the native script mode (and this can be done with localization), but it will be at least mildly annoying if you are in Latin mode and none of the accelerators work without first pressing the "alternate alphabet" key (and pressing it a second time afterwards to go back to Latin mode). That's what I'd like to avoid, but which requires extra support - either allowing a second (hidden) accelerator code, or having the sugar library understand the keyboard layout and support the extra mappings automatically. The latter is more work (and may not be practical for non-XO keyboards), but is easier for activity developers and localizers, and may be necessary in cases where a SCIM is in use.
>
>
>
>  @alex
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-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]