[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Localising tux type to Telugu regarding

[David Bruce]

Hi,

I am looking for localising tux type to telugu(a south Indian language).
> The problem I am facing is, the characters are not integral, the software
> uses one
> character as a separate typing entity, but in telugu, there are some
> characters which do
> not have any meaning if they are isolated, so sometimes, the typing entity
> can be of 2 or 3
> or 4 character length, at the max it could be 6 character length, where
> can we do these
> changes?
>

If I follow you, the problem you are facing is that SDL does not have any
built-in ability to handle input for languages that require more than one
keypress for each character.  This is why Tux Typing does not yet support
Chinese/Japanese/Korean, even though these are languages with very large
numbers of users.  The general term for code to address this issue is
"input methods" (IM).  Tux Paint does have such code, and a while back I
copied Tux Paint's IM code into Tux Typing and modified it a bit with the
aim of adding support for such languages, but I never finished the task.
So, the needed code is in the source tree, but it is never called at run
time.

So, for general support, someone (maybe me) needs to modify tuxtype's code
so that instead of immediately trying to look up the correct Unicode
character when a keypress is received, the keypress gets sent to the IM
state machine, which may or may not emit a Unicode character, depending on
whether a valid sequence has been completed.  The IM state machine
functions kind of like a telephone receptionist who listens to the phone
until a complete message has been received, and then passes the completed
message (the desired Unicode char) on to the rest of the program.  At least
that's how I understand it.  Also, we need to figure out how this impacts
on the system of having the language-specific keyboard.lst files, which was
developed under the assumption of "one keypress = one character".  The
whole system may need to be overhauled if we are going to have really
robust i18n support.

For Telagu, we need to create a IM character map for that language.  I
don't have any specific knowledge of how to do this.  The character maps in
tuxtype's source tree were just copied from Tux Paint.

I've cc'd Mark Kim, who wrote the IM code for Tux Paint, since my
understanding of this is not very deep.

-- 
David Bruce

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