IBus UI review
by Matthias Clasen
Not sure if this is the correct place to send this, but I'll send it
here anyway (please tell me if there's a better place).
I've recently installed ibus in order to get some impression of how our
new im framework will integrate in the desktop. While playing with it, I
took some notes, that I'd like to share.
Matthias
---
Status icon
- The tooltip "IBus - Running" is pretty pointless less and should be
removed until there is something useful to say
- There is no way to switch back to "no input method" from the status
icon. I have to press Ctrl-space to go back. Maybe add an "None" entry
at the bottom of the menu ?
Toolbar
- Why do input methods seem to fancy these weird undecorated floating
toolbars ? Does it add anything that is not already present in the
status icon ?
- If we can't drop it, can there at least be a way to turn it off ?
- The toolbar seems useless if "focus-follows-mouse" is turned on, since
it becomes inactive on focus out. This also affects the status icon.
Menus
- What is the plan, going forward, wrt to im-chooser ? I'd hate to have
2 input method related menuitems in the default install. My preference
would be to not install the im-chooser by default, since it is only
needed to switch back to 'legacy' frameworks.
- It would be great if we could use the generic "Input Method" menuitem
for the ibus preferences, and maybe rename im-chooser to "Input Method
Framework" or something like that.
- Alternatively, if we can't get rid of im-chooser by default, maybe
ibus-setup should not have its own menu item (I notice that scim-setup
doesn't have one either), since it is available via im-chooser.
- There is a mismatch between the menuitem and the ibus-setup window,
both the window title and icon don't match the menu, as they should.
Preferences, General tab
- "Aauto start IBus on session login" is very techno babble. Can we make
that something like "Enable Input Methods" ? I don't think there is any
need to talk about sessions and autostart here.
- Keyboard shortcuts: I would love to see these moved to the keyboard
shortcuts capplet, which has support for handling application-defined
shortcuts. As a bonus, you get automatic conflict handling. The one
restriction is that currently, only one key-combination per action is
possible. If having multiple is essential, you could either split it
into "Trigger", "Alternative Trigger", "Second Alternative Trigger", or
file a bug and I'll look into enabling multiple shortcuts per action in
the keybinding capplet
- "UI" is a bad section label. How about "Fonts & Style" instead ? Even
better would be to split it into two sections, a la
Input Window
Lookup table orientation: [Vertical]
[ ] Use the system font
Input Window Font: [Sans 10]
Language Bar
[ ] Show language bar
[ ] Hide language bar when it is not needed
Preferences, Engine tab
- "Engine" is a technical term that is not really helpful here. How
about "Languages" instead ?
- There are some icons missing in the combo box, e.g Telugu-apple,
Telugu-rts, Marathi-phonetic, Marathi-itrans...
- The main list needs to repeat the language name (like the status icon
menu already does) otherwise it is not clear if "phonetic" is Oriya or
Marathi.
Preferences, About tab
This should not be done as a tab, it is very much against the style of
our preference tools. There is already an About menu item on the status
icon. If you absolutely want to have an "About" in the preferences, it
should be a left-aligned "About" button in the action area that brings
up an about dialog. But I'd really just get rid of it.
14 years, 11 months
Iok-1.3.1 released
by Parag Nemade
Hi all,
iok 1.3.1 is now available for download at:
https://fedorahosted.org/releases/i/o/iok/iok-1.3.1.tar.gz
http://downloads.sf.net/iok/iok-1.3.1.tar.gz
iok-1.3.1.tar.gz md5sum: 9682116f61764ab3be2a9b7bdc147a54
This is a bug fix as well as UI enhancement release in the 1.3 series.
What is iok
============
iok is Indic Onscreen Keyboard. It shows keymaps in GUI for inscript
maps installed in
/usr/share/m17n directory. If no inscript maps found in /usr/share/m17n
then this application
will work as English on screen keyboard. Iok also supports default
keymap loading based
on current locale and its inscript map availability in /usr/share/m17n.
Other functionality this application provides is customization of system
installed inscript map.
Since iok-1.3.0 release, partial support for some indic xkb layouts has
been added.
iok is hosted at following locations
http://iok.sourceforge.net and
https://fedorahosted.org/iok
Overview of Changes from iok 1.2.1 to 1.3.1
==============================================
- Added Fn keys.
- improve keymap loading faster.
- Add partial xkb layout parsing support
- Enhance open_file() function.
- Make non-supported keymaps opened
to be added to the end of combo list.
Regards,
Parag.
15 years, 1 month
Re: Problem : japanese-fonts (vlgothic-fonts-20090204-2.fc10)
by Roozbeh Pournader
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 12:23 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I suspect the only reason that does not happen is we have a lot more
> CJK packages than Arabic packages (and no Fraktur packages that I know
> of).
:-)
You may be very right.
> It would be nice if our intended priorities and fontconfig settings
> for CJK fonts were documented somewhere (for every concerned locale).
> Then I could pester Behdad so he tells us how to achieve them cleanly.
> Right now, I'm not even sure this is clear to anyone but the concerned
> packagers. And every time I open a CJK fontconfig file I see magic of
> the blackest sort.
So, would you recommend a process and some high priorities?
fedora-i18n has a stake in this too, and we may be able to ask them
for some help.
(I would love to help in doing this, but I don't have much experience
with either CJK or fontconfig rules. I will jump in whenever Unicode
skills were called in. I also have a copy of the tome I mentioned
before, but haven't really spent much time with it.)
Roozbeh
15 years, 1 month
Iok-1.2.1 released
by Parag Nemade
FYI,
In case you have not updated iok since a week, you may like to
have a look at new iok release. This is minor release which enhances its UI.
iok 1.2.1 can be download at:
https://fedorahosted.org/releases/i/o/iok/iok-1.2.1.tar.gz
http://downloads.sf.net/iok/iok-1.2.1.tar.gz
Overview of Changes from iok 1.2.0 to 1.2.1
==============================================
- Make iok UI to be always on top
- Add tooltips to iok UI
- when used toggle "ToEnglish", inactivate keyboard selection list.
This release is already built for all Fedora active branches and for EL5
also.
Regards,
Parag.
15 years, 1 month
wordxtr-0.1.0 released
by Parag Nemade
Hi all,
wordxtr-0.1.0 is now available for download at:
https://fedorahosted.org/releases/w/o/wordxtr/wordxtr-0.1.0.tar.gz
wordxtr-0.1.0.tar.gz md5sum: 4d873dc5a7f1cd05c83efe628634f2f8
This is a minor bug fix release.
What is wordxtr
============
Wordxtr project aims at creating dictionary of words for a given
language text. This dictionary is based on hunspell
format where you need .dic and .aff files. wordxtr is command line
application that takes 2 input parameters.
First input parameter is language isocode along with country code like
hi_IN for Hindi language or for Nepali language use ne_NP.
Second input parameter is path to directory where plain text unicode
files have stored from which words will be extracted.
wordxtr is hosted at following location
https://fedorahosted.org/wordxtr
Overview of Changes from wordxtr 0.0.1 to 0.1.0
==============================================
- Enable existing hunspell dictionary .dic file as input data
- rewrite usage help
Regards,
Parag.
15 years, 2 months
BPG Georgian Unicode fonts - packagers wanted
by Nicolas Mailhot
Dear all,
Yesterday I took the time to find the current address of a well-known
Georgian font creator, Besarion Paata Gugushvili. Our current Georgian
support is rather limited: one set of glyphs in Dejavu, and nothing else
(This set was created by the very same author BTW). Imagine using the
same font all day long everywhere :(
Some of his other fonts had long found their way in other major
distributions (Mandriva, OpenSuse, Debian, Ubuntu…), at a time Fedora
was largely ignoring this problem-space, but there was no public
licensing statement of his part on any of his web sites. Which meant we
could not just lift the files from the internet, and package them to
reach Georgian support parity with others.
So took the time to write the author a long nice mail asking to confirm
the licensing. I didn't expect much, this kind of request usually takes
ages to be answered, and the answer is usually not the one we'd like
(when we don't hit language barriers).
Anyway this time the reply was awesome:
1. less than 9 hours later (most of them night I'm sure)
2. a *new* font pack release (not the old files everyone else ships)
3. with *new* fonts (not just updates of the fonts everyone else ships)
4. with a clear licensing statement on the author web site (not a
third-party site like before)
5. and adding the FSF font exception to the GPL statement (people who
tried know how hard it is to get this one usually, many font authors
just don't understand the need)
So, Fedora would seriously suck if we took ages to package those fonts
now. Or if other distros beat us to it. Unfortunately, I'm a *tad* busy
right now, and can't possibly work on it short term.
Therefore, I'm doing a public call on Fedora lists, for someone to
package those, and prove Besarion Paata Gugushvili was right to trust
Fedora.
All the relevant technical information is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BPG_fonts
Let's rock!
Best regards,
--
Nicolas Mailhot
15 years, 2 months
Lost in translation, part II: Lost in orthographies
by Roozbeh Pournader
I was trying to avoid fontconfig, but it caught me at the end. Trying
to figure out which languages in comps are supported by which font, to
be able to include them in the language group, I compared the list of
languages in F11's comps file with the orthography lists fontconfig
supports.
To my surprise, some were missing/problematic. The list is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/I18N/LanguageSupportCriteria/Missing_fontco...
I also found quite a few problems with existing orth files in
fontconfig that I'm working on fixing: http://tinyurl.com/dbk6a8
Since fontconfig support is critical for any language Fedora claims to
support [1], I think we should remove the language groups from comps
file if we don't have a fontconfig orthography file for it. I went and
updated the language criteria page we have here, adding a fontconfig
step:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/I18N/LanguageSupportCriteria
For the specific language cases, I went and filed upstream bugs
against fontconfig for all I could find, except for Berber, which is a
bit problematic by nature (language code used is actually for a family
of languages, glibc locales are incomplete, Latin/Tifinagh/Arabic
script division is not along country lines...).
This is a report. I would appreciate help and feedback, especially
your thoughts about fontconfig .orth requirements for claiming
language support in Fedora.
Roozbeh
[1]: Ask fc-list which fonts support Kinyarwanda (rw) by running
"fc-list :lang=rw": it gives you nothing, while in real life, almost
every font on your machine supports it.
15 years, 2 months
