Re: macrons

Dear All,

> Hopefully the option to "Insert, Symbol" (a built in Character Map
> program) should provide what you need and the Keyman software might
> nto even be necessary.

Unfortunately, the "Insert, Symbol" is worse than useless on Windows (bugs
are filed). It displays only the first 256 codepoints of a font, so almost
never the interesting ones, and for some masquerading fonts (which have
special characters at places where there are normally the CP1252 chars), it
freezes the app.

> It might still be useful to know what this keyman software is and have you
> asked them to improve their software to work with Abiword? (can you provide
> a link please?)

Tavultesoft (http://www.tavultesoft.com/) Keyman is an important factor, as
it is the only way to type some languages/scripts on windows. It is use for
Devanagari Sanskrit and romanized Sanskrit, polytonic Greek, Tagalog, just
an endless list: http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/downloads/keyboards/

It is free for personal use.

Users (in contrast to developers) just don't get it, why some apps don't
work with Keyman, as even simple things like Notepad, Wordpad or the text
entry fiels in all applications work. Even Mozilla, despite the totally re-
programmed UI is working.

As a developer my guess is, that Keyman requires the program to (mostly)
ignore the WM_KEYDOWN messages and process the WM_CHAR messages instead.
 
> I would have thought it just cuts and pastes text into the document and if
> we were really stuck it might be possible to adapt it to work with Abiword.

cut-n-paste from notepad etc. works. But otherwise, Abiword is still an
I18n nightmare, sorry to say that.

I don't know whether it would be easier to make it Tavultesoft compatible,
un-break the Insert-Sysmbol or just add an own combining method (type
COMBINE-"a"-"-" to get a with macron).

But the joy of Tavultesoft Keyman is the flexibility, you have the choice
of keyboard layouts with different combining methods, or automatci macron
generation (type two "a"s and get a with macron).

Regards,
Peter Jacobi

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Received on Thu Oct 7 13:43:10 2004