Re: [Bug-apl] Keyboard layout alternative

[David B. Lamkins]

On Fri, 2013-11-08 at 14:47 +0100, Juergen Sauermann wrote:
> thank you very much for this information.

Thank you for your work on GNU APL.

> GNU APL itself is keyboard layout agnostic, as long as it receives UTF-8 
> encoded
> Unicode characters (from the keyboard, from a file, from an ssh login, 
> or even from an
> 8-bit telnet connection) everyting should be fine.

Understood.

However, the keyboard layouts that I described don't currently support
composition. (IIRC, one of the Dyalog APL guys has submitted a version
which does support composition, but I don't think that has made it into
any of the distros yet.) Given the inability to compose (overstrike)
characters, it's important that the keyboard layout presents all of the 
glyphs used by the particular APL implementation.

I compared the keyboard layouts against the required characters listed
in the ISO 13751 document (Table 1); the apl2 keyboard that I suggested
previously does not have the diaeresis tilde character.

The regular apl layout (named "APL Keyboard Symbols" in the layout
applet) seems to have all of the characters required by ISO 13751.

The only other disconnect that I can see w.r.t. the keyboard is that
GNU APL's ]KEYB command is constructed for the supplied apl.xmodmap
and will be incorrect for folks who use the built-in GNU/Linux apl
keyboard layouts.

It's obviously possible to construct a layout drawing on-the-fly,
but probably not worth the effort given that GNOME already provides
this functionality via its "Show Keyboard Layout" applet.

> 
> I believe the best way forward is to collect the different methods 
> around and to put
> the descriptions and config files into a 'keyboard' directory in the 
> next release of GNU APL.

That sounds like a reasonable approach.

If you'd like me to summarize all of my configuration hints for
Debian, I'd be happy to save you the trouble of reconstructing 
something coherent from these multiple posts.