Onscreen Keyboard- Weekly Report 07
As I mentioned last week, I have been traveling this past week. Despite that I have managed to get a lot done. I rewrote most of the Caribou fullscale layout in order to accommodate for the F1-12 keys and get rid of some of the ugly gaps in the layout. Dan also mentioned that he means to complete a fullscale-keyboard-generator-via-xkb soon, so that the keyboard layouts will not need to be hardcoded (at least the fullscale ones). After talking to Eitan today, it seems that keyboard layouts in general will be hand-generated. Thus far, we have the US, Hebrew, and Arabic keyboards working correctly (“Region and Localization” → “Layouts” → [select layout]). The keyboard has also been added to the a11y menu items, so that the user can turn it off/on through UI. In addition to this further integration into GNOME shell, I have also rebased with Caribou to get the newest updates including the xml parser (used to be JSON). Besides this, I have been taking a closer look at bugs creeping about the keyboard and thinking through future additions/functionality for the keyboard, which includes integrating positioning, hide/show-ing keyboard properly, layouts, heuristics to detect if hardware keyboard is available, and having an explicit way to pop up the keyboard.
Much of what I planned to do for this week was successfully accomplished. For next week I still don't have a very concrete plan of what I will be working on, but most likely it will have to do with hiding and showing the keyboard properly. If time permits I would also like to work on including some more layouts for different languages into the touch and fullscale directories.
The helpful hint of the week would be that in order to get jhbuild to recognize the newly added gschema, you need to run:
jhbuild run glib-compile-schemas ~/gnome-shell/install/share/glib-2.0/schemas
I had a lot of trouble trying to get gsettings to recognize the keyboard-type key because there is an issue with jhbuild that doesn't recompile the schemas. The above is a quick solution to that problem, thanks Dan.
Cheers,
Nohemi Fernandez