Re: Determining XKeysyms

[Matthew Garrett <mjg59 srcf ucam org>]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 01:24:49PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:

> That would be great from my point of view, but implementing something 
> myself is also an option. I also need to look into the Windows interface 
> for this stuff and see what messy details I need to go into there.

For anyone who's interested: Windows provides two mechanisms for this, 
the availability of which depends on the version.

1) vkkeyscan will take a character and turn it into the corresponding
virtual-key code *and shift state* for the current keyboard. The
vkkeyscanex version lets you choose any loaded keymap, so I can load a
keymap corresponding to the loaded Dasher alphabet, generate a keycode
and then send it to the application using kbd_event without having to
know anything about the user's keyboard.

2) In Windows 2000 and later, I can use SendInput with a kbdinput 
structure. I can simply stuff a UTF8 character into this and magic stuff 
that I probably don't want to understand happens.

So, at the moment, it looks significantly easier to do this with Windows 
than X. Another application that I looked at that's doing something 
similar under X11 is Xstroke, which is an on-screen scribbling input 
thing. It seems to use an X keysym lookup defined in its alphabet, but I 
didn't check how comprehensive its list of characters was.
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 srcf ucam org