Re: Loadable keyboards

[Jo Even Skarstein <joska@nuts.edu>]

On Sun, 21 Jun 1998, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:

>  >inconvenient. I suggest to go the other way, extend bios/gemdos to
>  >handle keytables for alt/shift+alt/caps+alt as well. This should be
>  >quite easy to do in Clocky as well.
> 
> The problem is, the KBD table format only knows about:
> 
>    Normal, Shifted, Caps.
>    
> It doesn't know about Control or Alternate key combinations.

This is what I suggest to do something about. A alt/shift+alt/caps+alt
keymaps would IMHO be very useful, and should also be easy to
implement.

> Then, there's the CKBD table format, which is text-based and even more
> flexible, as it assumes Alt is gonna be used to request an accent; it
> follows the Dec/VT convention of Alt, followed by letter, then accent.

But it's totally useless for people that normally use Alt-keys to
access []{} etc. That means that we have to access our national
characters with three keystrokes (Å -> Alt+A+*) instead of one. 

> ;(IOS-8859-1 table)

This is IMHO a very inconvenient method of getting a ISO-layout.
In our case (and also on Windows or MacOS) it's up to the application
to handle the ISO character-set, and not the OS/keyboard handler.

E.g I patched TosWin2 to handle several character-sets (including
ISO-8859-1) by remapping the incoming character-stream. Another way of
doing this would be to translate to/from a different character-set
when saving/loading or sending/receiving.

> This makes it MUCH easier to remap keyboards, contrary to the KBD
> format, where you always have to guess that greek Theta will result
> in "e circumflex" because it's ascii 233.

?? You assign an ASCII-value to a key, what can be more
straight-forward and simple than that? Remember that at this level
you're dealing with the Atari character-set and not Latin-1 (or
whatever). As I said, translations to other character-sets should be
done by applications and not the OS.


/*
** Jo Even Skarstein    http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~josk/
**
**    beer - maria mckee - atari falcon - babylon 5
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