Re: [Vxl-maintainers] New vgui_font class and keyboard event issues.

[Miguel A. Figueroa-V. <mi...@ie...>]

[Peter Vanroose wrote:]
>> ?         | vgui_SHIFT | / |  ?
>>
>> However, qt and gtk (not sure what mfc does) both get the ASCII
>> character of the event and do:
>> ...
>> ?         | vgui_SHIFT | ? |  ?
> 
> The former is indeed too much "keyboard layout" oriented, i.e., does
> not work for people with a non-QWERTY keyboard.
> And there are lots of people in that case!
> (Mine, for example, is AZERTY, with SHIFT(',') = '/' and lots of other
> SHIFT differences).
> I would be very surprised if MFC would do it differently from gtk or
> Qt, since Microsoft has always taken care of different keyboard
> layouts.

Note that where I wrote qt/gtk/mfc, I should have referred to those vgui 
toolkit implementations (i.e., qt/gtk/mfc support doing the right thing, 
but the toolkit might not be up-to-date, or might have coded some 
different interpretation of the docs).

The current design was intended to constrain the events specified by 
users to a valid state. A user writing something like:

   vgui_event_condition(vgui_key('A'), vgui_MODIFIER_NULL);

is clearly trying to get the [a/A] keypress, but the requirement of 
having to press the SHIFT to get the 'A' makes this impossible to get to.

>>   if (k > 0 && k < 32 && k != vgui_ESC && k != vgui_TAB ...)
> 
> This *could* be a keyboard layout related choice as well.
> Of course all (Western) keyboards have Enter, Esc and Tab, and nothing
> else, but I vaguely remember having read that Don Knuth is using a
> keyboard with lots of other keys (maybe including a formfeed key?)
> Also, most keyboards have two Enter keys which could be mapped to
> different things (like ASCII 10 versus ASCII 13).
> 
> So couldn't this issue be solved somehow in a way that does *not* make
> any assumptions on the keyboard being used? (But I have no actual
> suggestion as to how to do that since my knowledge of vgui is rather
> limited...) If not, I'm happy with the "if k != vgui_TAB" etc, but in
> that case this choice should be clearly documented, I believe.

Well, the correct thing to do is to use the ascii_char instead of the 
modifier+key combination... Currently, you could just as well do:

vgui_event_condition('A') // this will compare the ascii value

or

// this will compare to the key_press and the modifier
vgui_event_condition('a', vgui_SHIFT)

// this only works because we are anticipating
// the error and changing 'A' to 'a'
vgui_event_condition('A', vgui_SHIFT)

So, ideally we would like users to do

vgui_event_condition('?')

instead of the other two...

vgui_event_condition('/', vgui_SHIFT
vgui_event_condition('?', vgui_SHIFT)

--Miguel