[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Google Summer of Code student seeks mentor

[David Bruce]

Hi Andreas,

On Sunday 23 March 2008 08:22:35 pm you wrote:
> Hi David,
> I am also a student who is interested in participating in the Google Summer
> of Code working on TuxType.

Great!

> I noticed this myself: The German keyboard layout doesn't support some
> characters like 'ü', 'ä' and 'ö'.

They can just be added to the keyboard.lst file for the German theme, and the 
game should then support them.

> I am also interested in adding an in-game 
> support for editing word lists

This would be an extremely useful feature.

> and implementing the auto-detection of 
> typeable characters.
I don't think this can be done via the current SDL API - for a clean, 
cross-platform way to do this, I think we need to wait until the next SDL 
version (see below).

> Alternatively, I would also like to replace some of 
> the "homebrew stuff" with GNU gettext, if this is needed more urgently than
> the other features.

I think GNU gettext would be a significant step forward.
>
> I don't think changing to SDL 1.3 would be a good choice, because it is
> unstable, do you? And I don't know when SDL 2.0 will be released, I guess
> it might still take some time.
That's more along the lines of something to take place in the future.

> Do you also think that adding this feature 
> as another type of "homebrew stuff" would be reasonable? Actually, I think
> it is, because detecting the typeable characters seems quite specialized to
> me and I am not sure if it will ever be implemented into SDL.

If SDL supported it, it would just be a matter of going through each keysym 
and checking to see what Unicode value is attached to it.  In other words, 
during setup have tuxtype generate a fake key event for each of the SDL 
keysyms, and keep track of the resulting Unicode values.  AFAIK, there isn't 
any way to do this in SDL 1.2, but it looks like there will be a way to do it 
in 1.3/2.0.

Regards,

-- 
David Bruce