Re: [Usability] Keyboard layout preview in gnome-control-center

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, 2004-07-14 at 17:42 +0100, Sergey V. Udaltsov wrote:

> BTW, this is not about variants only. Some countries even have several 
> layouts (well, this is for historical reasons, xkeyboard-config is going 
> to change this) - but for now, all existing X servers (up to xfree 4.4.0 
> and xorg 6.7.0) provide SEVERAL US layouts. Which one should user 
> choose? How can he/she guess without spending time pressing each button?

A text description would help -- e.g. the "US International" layout is
the same as the US one except that " ' and ` become accent keys.

>  It needs some polishing - but we cannot improve it much (other 
> than smoothing edges, improve labels placement etc) - because the 
> geometry is generally described in X server geometry.
You could use openGL and provide a perspective view :-)
Also compare jwz's xkeycaps program.

Use of colour and shading, using the user's chosen theme colours
and fonts and sizes, maybe with a "test" mode where people can
work out which key on their keyboard corresponds to which key in
the X server's twisted brain, so needing a visual highlight and
perhaps a text input box.  Integrating VOK might be interesting.

(Sun's OpenWindows used to have one in which each key was actually a
toolkit button, and you could keep it visible to provide input
to other windows, although there were confusing focus problems.
It was especially interesting with just the function keys visible,
as you could "program" them independently of the application)

Liam


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