Judeo-Tat/Keyboard

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Keyboard Layouts

Background

Judeo-Tat can be written in Latin, Cyrillic, or Hebrew. This means that I created three keyboards, one for each language. There already exists a cyrillic layout, but I felt it was poorly laid out. In addition, Judeo-Tat uses a subset of each common set of characters in addition to a few unusual characters. This means that I leaned towards replacing unused characters with any additional characters that were needed.

For all keyboards, I made efforts to keep commonly used non-letter characters on the first and second levels (commas, periods, quotes, apostrophes).

Writing in other languages like English or Russian would be difficult because they keyboard layouts in their respective alphabets are missing several common letters found in those languages.

Judeo-Tat with Latin

Judeo-Tat in Latin
In Latin, Judeo-Tat uses 5 additional characters and does not use several common characters. I made an effort to maintain the basic qwerty design with as little disruption as possible. I have moved brace and brackets to third and fourth levels because I feel like they are not used frequently enough in common usage to warrant having their own keys and pushing more common letters into hard to reach places on the keyboard.

Judeo-Tat with Cyrillic

Judeo-Tat in Cyrillic
Cyrillic is the most common alphabet used for writing Judeo-Tat. Like with Latin, I made an effort to keep this keyboard fairly close to the standard Russian keyboard. This is in order to make it less confusing for a potential user who is used to that keyboard layout.

For the purposes of this class and because I am more familiar with the English keyboard, I have rearranged the keyboard to be an almost direct mapping between Latin and Cyrillic characters (2/23/17)

Judeo-Tat with Hebrew

Judeo-Tat in Hebrew
Hebrew is also a common alphabet used for Judeo-Tat, likely in part due to such a large population of speakers living in Israel. I have kept this keyboard layout mostly consistent with the standard Hebrew layout.

Installation

  1. Download all the files listed in in my keyboard repo on github. You can do this with git clone git@github.swarthmore.edu:dyelsey1/ling073-jdt-keyboard.git
  2. Put the all the tks files in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols. You can use the cp command to do it, and you'll probably need to use sudo too. E.g. sudo cp tks /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/
  3. Add a layout entry in the /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml file for the layout. To do this, edit that file with your favorite text editor (again, you'll probably need sudo), and search for the end of the layoutList section by searching for </layoutList> in the file. Copy a simple layout block from above that line, paste it in as a new layout block (between the last </layout> and </layoutList>and modify it for this layout. You can use something like this:
         <layout>
          <configItem>
            <name>jdt-lat</name>
            <shortDescription>jdt-lat</shortDescription>
            <description>Judeo-Tat (Latin)</description>
            <languageList><iso639Id>jdt</iso639Id><iso639Id>jdt-lat</iso639Id></languageList>
          </configItem>
        </layout>
         <layout>
          <configItem>
            <name>jdt-cyr</name>
            <shortDescription>jdt-cyr</shortDescription>
            <description>Judeo-Tat (Cyrillic)</description>
            <languageList><iso639Id>jdt</iso639Id><iso639Id>jdt-cyr</iso639Id></languageList>
          </configItem>
        </layout>
         <layout>
          <configItem>
            <name>jdt-heb</name>
            <shortDescription>jdt-heb</shortDescription>
            <description>Judeo-Tat (Hebrew)</description>
            <languageList><iso639Id>jdt</iso639Id><iso639Id>jdt-heb</iso639Id></languageList>
          </configItem>
        </layout>
    
  4. Save the file, exit the editor, and restart cinnamon. The quickest way to do this is to run cinnamon --replace on the command line.
  5. Go back to your keyboard layout settings, and you should be able to find all three layouts under "Judeo-Tat (*)" in the list.
  6. License

    MIT License

    Copyright (c) 2017 David Yelsey

    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE

    SOFTWARE.