Difference between revisions of "Spring 2017/Making a keyboard layout"

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(Created page with "== Classroom activities == === Using a keyboard already on your system === The desktop environment that the virtual machines logs in to is Cinnamon, which is based on Gnome2...")
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Revision as of 22:47, 21 January 2017

Classroom activities

Using a keyboard already on your system

The desktop environment that the virtual machines logs in to is Cinnamon, which is based on Gnome2. The instructions here will assume that this is what you're using, though there are a number of other linux desktop environments out there, where these instructions may need to be tweaked a bit.

  1. Open keyboard settings. One way to do this is to right click on an empty part of the panel/bar at the bottom of the screen and click "All Settings"; then find "Keyboard". (Alternatively, just click the "Menu" button at the bottom left and type "Keyboard" and press enter.)
  2. Go to the "Keyboard layouts" tab and add ("+" button) a layout of your choice. Something obviously different from the US English layout (like Russian or Hebrew) might be good for testing.
  3. Set up three keys: an Alt-Gr / 3rd level key (recommended: right ‹Alt›), a compose key (recommended: left Windows key), and a layout-switching key (recommended: ‹Caps Lock› OR left ‹Alt›+‹Shift›). In the Keyboard layouts window, click "Options..." (bottom right), and find the following (respectively): "Key to choose 3rd level", "Position of Compose key", and "Switching to another layout".
  4. Test your keys in a text editor.
    • You can preview your keyboard to see if 3rd-level options exist (they're to the left of the normal key values), and if they don't, you can try adding a keyboard layout like "Russian (Kazakhstan, with Kazakh). Then ‹Alt-Gr› + ‹f› should print "ә" (Cyrillic [æ] letter).
    • Using an English keyboard layout, you can test your Compose key as follows: press ‹Compose› once, press ‹e› twice; this should print "ə" (Latin-alphabet schwa letter). Try other combinations, like ‹Compose› + ‹t› + ‹h›, or ‹Compose› + ‹=› + ‹E›.

Issues to consider

Technical issues

  • Many-character input (e.g., kana)
  • Compose key versus

Design issues

  • What to base your input method on
    • Is there a layout used in the region that already has all the characters available? Or is one character short?
  • Use of other languages

What not to do

  • Which of these keyboard layouts do you think Kazakh speakers prefer to type Kazakh?


Assignment

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