Re: Keyboard questions

[James S. <jsi...@su...>]

> There was an idea, that only Unicode keymaps are used and then the
> keyboard driver will translate to a user specified charset (through an
> ACM). Will this feature be in 2.4?

   From what I can remember the code for 2.4 and 2.2. are the same for
keymap handling. Understand if we went to unicode keymaps this would break
the currennt keyboard utility programs. Because of userland utilities I 
pretty much have kept the functionality the same. I have tried some
modifications which where needed.
   In the ruby tree the way it works is 8 bit characters coming in from a
tty or from the keyboard are translated by a ACM to a unicode value. Then
the unicode value is translated by a screen font map from unicode to which
glyph. Actually this is very similar to how 2.2. and 2.4. You could do the
same ACMs since ACM to unicode mappings don't have to be 1 to 1. I get
around this by using unicodes that are one to one. Often a character
has one unicode value to represent it and a combination of unicode
codes as well. 
 
> The compose mechanisams in kernel-2.2 didn't work for unicode. Can you
> tell me something more about the compose handling in 2.4? 
> 
> Will this work in 2.4:
> 	compose U+0435 grave to U+0450

I doubt it. More for me to work on ;-( 

> 
> And lastly, how good is UTF-8 support in the console in 2.4. There were
> some problems in kernel-2.2?

Still broken :-( I need to work on this more.