I am trying to create a non-roman keyboard for Android. Non-roman meaning that the characters will be different symbols (for Tibetan) which are not supported by Android.
My question: is it possible to create a keyboard which will be supported all through Android? In the way that if I switch to this keyboard will allow me to write in this particular language in any application or write notes, etc.
In iOS it is possible but I haven't seen it in Android.
I was looking at http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/create-a-custom-keyboard-on-android--cms-22615 where they define the keys:
<Row>
<Key android:codes="49" android:keyLabel="1" android:keyEdgeFlags="left"/>
<Key android:codes="50" android:keyLabel="2"/>
<Key android:codes="51" android:keyLabel="3"/>
<Key android:codes="52" android:keyLabel="4"/>
<Key android:codes="53" android:keyLabel="5"/>
</Row>
How can I define the keys if they are not Roman characters? Also I should be able to connect some font type where the characters are defined, where I do that?
Thanks
Yes, you can make your own keyboard application the system default, there are lots of applications doing exactly this already, like Swype or Swiftkey.
Here is a guide for this. The most relevant part is the manifest file, which tells Android that your application provides a keyboard service, and you can set it as your own keyboard in the Settings.
Update:
The android:codes XML attribute, according to the documentation means:
The unicode value or comma-separated values that this key outputs.
May be a string value, using '\\;' to escape characters such as '\\n' or '\\uxxxx' for a unicode character.
May be an integer value, such as "100".
So you should use the Unicode character option. For example, the Hungarian letter ő could be achieved by \\u0151. For finding out the Unicode characters you need, you could use this online service.
Related
I would like to write in arbitrary fonts in the terminal, such as Chinese, Devangari, Mayan Hieroglyphs (a font that is not even part of unicode yet), etc.
I would like to press "a" to get ऄ, etc., basically I say "enter encoding DEVANAGARI" and now "a" is ऄ, etc. Or I say "enter encoding MAYAN" and "a" is some "private unicode space" glyph, etc. How can I do this? Can I set it dynamically somehow, maybe using Swift (for Mac) if I had a Mac app running in the background?
For example, I would imagine like this:
$ change-script DEVANAGARI
$ a
# replaced with
$ ऄ
# etc
How can I do this in the Terminal app, or in any app for that matter?
This way I can use the ASCII keyboard to write in arbitrary fonts even if they aren't in unicode.
Answering the title question: yes. This can be accomplished by changing the active keyboard. Apple supplies a bunch (including many QWERTY-style for various scripts that roughly map the English/latin letters to (rough) equivalents in the script). As noted in a comment, there are tools available to create custom layouts if the supplied ones are not sufficient.
As to the question of doing it programatically, that's trickier. The accepted answer to this (old) SO question suggests that you can programatically switch keyboards (presumably: installed ones).
But by a close read of your question and follow-up, it seems like you basically want to create/modify the active keyboard dynamically (?). I'd be surprised if anything like that is supported, but I'm also not sure why it would be necessary to do that if you have the ability to switch programatically.
I write mostly my documentation in HTML using emacs as my main editor. Emacs let you interactively spell-check the current buffer with the command ispell-buffer.
Since I switch between a number of languages, I have an HTML comment at the end of the file specifying the main dictionary and personal dictionary for that file, E.g. for Norwegian (norsk) I use the following pair of dictionaries:
<!-- Local IspellDict: norsk -->
<!-- Local IspellPersDict: ~/.aspell/personal.dict -->
This works great.
However, sometimes I have a paragraph in another language (e.g. English) embedded in an otherwise Norwegian document. Example:
<p xml:lang="en">This paragraph is in English.</p>
The spell-checker naturally flag all the words in such a paragraph as misspellings (since the dictionary only contain Norwegian words).
To avoid this, I've tried to add a "british" dictionary to the document, like this:
<!-- Local IspellDict: british -->
<!-- Local IspellDict: norsk -->
<!-- Local IspellPersDict: ~/.aspell/personal.dict -->
Unfortunately, this does not work. The "british" dictionary is simply ignored.
My prefered solution would to load an additional dictionary and use this, toghether with the primary dictionary, for spell-checking. Is this possible?
However, I am also interested in a solution that let me mark paragraphs for not being spell checked. It is not ideal, but it would stop valid English words from being flagged as misspellings.
PS: I have also looked at the answer to this question: Multilingual spell checking with language detection, but it is much broader and does not address the specific use emacs ispell for doing the spell-check.
Try ispell-multi and flyspell-xml-lang http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Emacs/
You can spawn multiple instances of ispell, and use the xml:lang tag to decide which language to check for.
There are a lot of programmers editors that claim to support unicode / utf-8. I've tried a number of them (UltraEdit, jedit, emedit) but none of them tell you how to actually enter unicode characters into a file. Some of them tell you how to change the default file encoding to utf-8 or how to select a font that has good support for utf-8, but not how to enter utf-8 into a file using their editor.
The Go language (and some others) support utf-8 and I like the idea of using the actual utf-8 symbols for variables instead of variables with names like omega. I haven't found a programmers editor yet that actually allows you to do this, though.
The only editor / word processor that I've found that lets you how to enter unicode is Microsoft Word. Type the unicode and Alt+X and Word converts it. To get the Greek letter omega type "03c9" followed by Alt+X. UltraEdit will let you copy utf-8 from a web page into it, but their docs don't say how to actually enter utf-8 in a file, and their tech. support people don't know either.
This should be simple, but seems to be completely undocumented. Is there some key combination convention the lets you enter unicode into these editors that supposedly support unicode the way that Ctrl-F is widely used for search?
Thanks.
The standard programmer’s editor vim(1) supports limited Unicode input even if your operating system should be too broken to do so (are there any such, still?).
Just enter ^VuXXXX, where XXXX represents exactly four hex digits.
That will allow you to enter the ~6% of Unicode allocated to the Basic Multilingual Plane. The rest are forbidden to you.
This may be fixed in a newer release.
Otherwise, just use your mouse.
A few techniques I use if an editor is lacking:
Use the Windows charmap.exe utility to select characters and paste into a document.
Install an input method editor (IME) to write in a particular language.
Windows ALT keycodes.
Better to set your keyboard to generate Unicode characters across all Windows applications than to rely on a single application's custom input feature IMO.
Use the EnableHexNumpad feature and you can type any character in the Basic Multilingual Plane using Alt+numbad-plus,hexcode. (May not be of much use on a laptop without a numpad though.)
Or if there are particular characters you want to type a lot, find a keyboard layout that allows you to type them directly. For example eurokb might cover it, or you can make your own with MSKLC.
Old question, but you can type a lot of unicode in GNU Emacs or Vim
GNU Emacs: M-x set-input-method RET tex (or C-x RET C-\ tex) will let you type \omega to generate ω
Vim: Vim digraphs can generate unicode; C-k w * in insert mode gives you ω.
deceze hit the nail on the head. (S)he just didn't elaborate. bobince gave a bit more.
And I'm hazarding a guess that you're a developer or tester working on L14N or I18N. I'm also guessing you need to do more than just a few characters here or there, or you'd be satisfied with pasting from another app. So, I'll share some advice. (note: here, "you" refers to the next person to look here. I'm sure the original poster doesn't care anymore by now. :-))
If you're on Windows 10, install an appropriate keyboard driver that lets you input the characters you want into any application. I'm sure Linux has support for the same sort of thing.
E.g. I'm teaching myself Hindi (हिंदी), so I installed Windows' Hindi (Devanangari) support. I typed "Hindi", in Hindi using that support, then I switched back to US English to do the rest of this post. If all you need are accented characters from Western European languages, you can install the INTL English support and type directly in español or français or whatever.
Don't look at entering Unicode characters as entering some sort of special data amidst your English text. It's just someone else's language. Use their keyboard. Type their language.
I'm writing a flashcard app to help my learning. I'm using the Hindi keyboard support to type characters into Word, WordPad, Excel, and the Visual Studio editor. And that Hindi keyboard support works exactly the same way in all of those apps, as I'd expect it to work in just about any text editor that supports Unicode. And as you saw above, it also works in a simple text edit control in Chrome. No copy and paste. No remembering special codes. It's as ubiquitous as ctrl-F.
It looks like the unicode support in programmers editors (except for some Microsoft products) is mostly read-only. They can open a file with unicode and display the characters, but typing unicode into a file is a different story. If you want to enter unicode in a programmers editor you can copy it from somewhere else (a web page or Microsoft Word or Notepad) and paste it into the editor, but the editors make typing unicode difficult or impossible.
UltraEdit tech support referred me to this web page which explains a lot. Unfortunately none of the solutions worked with UltraEdit.
Microsoft Word and Notepad support unicode entry. Type the unicode value followed by Alt+X and it converts the hexadecimal and displays it. You can then copy and paste it into UltraEdit or one of the other programmers editors. As others have mentioned unicode support depends on support within the operating system as well as the editor.
What got me interested in using unicode in source code files is Mark Summerfield's book Programming in Go. He includes an example .go file that uses unicode. It would be great to use unicode Greek characters for variable names instead of variables named "omega" or "theta".
Using unicode in source code is a bad idea, however. Support for unicode in programmers editors is lousy, and developers would have to save or convert their source code files to utf-8 instead of ASCII. Developer's tools are just not ready to write code in unicode no matter how neat the idea sounds.
I have a MFC application compiled with the MBCS character set. I have a submenu off of my main menu that I would like to add unicode characters to. Can that be done?
You can force the use of Unicode strings even in MBCS apps by explicitely calling the Unicode form of an API and passing it a Unicode string.
In your case, ModifyMenuW() is the API that sets the menu item text (assuming the menu item already exists):
ModifyMenuW(GetMenu()->m_hMenu,ID_APP_ABOUT, MF_BYCOMMAND , 0, L"\u573F");
This code displays a Chinese ideogram (I have no idea of its meaning) instead of the original text
The L in front of the string says it's a Unicode string. \u573F is the way you encode a Unicode char in your C++ ASCII source file. The W at the end of the API name: It stands for Wide and denotes the Unicode form of the API.
Note that if your goal is to translate the full UI of your app, this is a complete other story: The method I showed here is only suitable for one-shot calls. You can't create a full UI that way.
You can translate your MBCS app to Japanese, Russian, whatever,... without switching to Unicode (Although it would be a very good idea to do that switch. But that can be costly for legacy apps).
You have 2 friends to help you out there: appTranslator lets you very easily translate your app (and manage your translations (Disclaimer: This is my own ad ;-) and Microsoft AppLocale helps you test MBCS apps in different codepages without actually changing the codepage of your computer (which requires a reboot).
Can someone please tell me how to determine the unicode character point of a multi-key combination that includes the "command" key? For example, if a user presses the "command" key and "1" key on the keyboard at the same time, what is the unicode character representation for that?
Maybe I'm searching on the wrong thing, but I am not able to locate this in the character maps, keyboard references, or unicode tables I find. I can sort out other key combinations (e.g. shift-1) as there is an obvious character output of "!" that I can look up and find that it is U+0021. When I go to character maps or applications the command key always seems to take an action rather than output a character result to screen.
My app is for iOS, which I would expect to be the same as Mac OS X in terms of the unicode code point. All of the iOS APIs that provide access to the keyboard see it as a source of Unicode characters. Thus the reason I am trying to detect keystrokes this way.
Thanks.
Keyboard codes are basically independent of character codes.
While (as you mention) many keys have standard mappings to standard ASCII codes, it is up to the application to decide what to do with them.
Some input API's may be widely used on a particular OS, and some applications (e.g., terminal emulators) may be used as a common input method for a class of tasks, but there is no universal standard.
Obligatory wikipedia link for Unicode input.
You can't. There simply are no Unicode codepoints that correspond to Command + some-other-character.
The same is true of Shift, by the way. The fact that your computer happens to map certain combinations to certain Unicode codepoints does not imply that Unicode specifies such mappings, or that mappings exist for every combination of keys, or that those mappings are the same for everyone else. I use two keyboards every day; one of them maps Shift+3 to #, the other maps it to £. This is decided by the operating system, not by Unicode. If you tried to detect a Shift+3 keypress by listening for #, your program would seem to me to be broken half the time.
This is a perfect example of an XY question. You don't really care about Unicode -- what you really want to know is how to detect keypresses with the Command modifier on iOS. You should just have asked how to do that! There is probably an API that does exactly what you need that you have simply missed, because you were concentrating on your assumption that the solution would involve Unicode -- and there are probably numerous iOS experts who have not bothered to read this question at all, because they thought your problem related to Unicode rather than iOS.
Simple answer: no.
You haven't told us what sort of computer you are using. Mapping a key press to a Unicode code point is operating system specific, and then it depends on the locale that is active.