Yesterday when I posted about The real problems with keyboard switching, I listed what were the three most common complaints I had heard previously about working with other language keyboards:

  • The movement of some letters within a script;
  • The movement of punctuation always;
  • The lack of phonetic relationship between scripts.

And then I said I'd think about this since it seems like it should be easier to handle some of these things in a more automated fashion....

I ended up with a whole bunch of mail with people asking me what I meant -- what could be done here?

Well, I was wondering whether MSKLC could handle some of this a bit more gracefully?

For example, the first problem is caused in Latin keyboards by movement of the VK_* values, so what if there were an option to load existing keyboard #! but using the VK_* positions of existing keyboard #2?

Similarly, the second problem is caused by a combination of the first problem and a new one with the actual assignments being changed, so what if there were an option to load the letters of existing keyboard #1 but to use the symbols of existing keyboard #2, both for values and position?

The third problem could be a bit harder since the phonetic values, especially according to the letters between two languages, may be non-trivial. But building such phonetic keyboards is a situation where some sensible defaults could be attempted and then a little bit of swapping around could take care of the rest. Perhaps a "swap keys" functionality would be possible? (this could be useful in other situations too).

Now obviously there is much more that could probably happen and there may be better ideas (these are just off the top of my head and some of them may not be practical). But it is a start, right?

 

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