Firefox shortcuts in Linux on non-us keyboard layout, and Greek
You tried to use the common keyboard shortcuts in the Linux version of Firefox, with a keyboard layout other than us, and you realised they do not work. For example, Ctrl-C does not work when the Greek keyboard layout is active because Firefox receives Ctrl-Ψ (which is undefined).
This is a well-known problem affecting keyboard shortcuts in many languages.
How can someone solve the problem; Should Firefox for Linux be configured so that internally it would consider Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Ψ correspond to the same keyboard shortcut (perhaps in the language pack)? Well, the problem is that one would prefer a solution that is independent of the keyboard layout. You might be running a Greek localisation of Firefox with an active layout for Hindi.
The optimal solution is to have Firefox associate the keyboard shortcuts to physical keys (whatever that means) instead of the characters they are producing. Bug #69230/Mozilla has been there for quite some time although an acceptable solution is available in both GTK+ (GNOME) and OpenOffice.org. For example, in a GNOME application, both Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Ψ are equivalent.
So, what can we do now with the Linux versions of Firefox? Well, it is possible to write a Firefox extension that would intercept keys being pressed in a local layout and convert to the standard keyboard shortcuts Firefox likes.
Such a workaround is available for the Greek language, written by Athanasios Lefteris, at Mozilla και συντομεύσεις πληκτρολογίου σε Linux.
Currently the extension exists in the sandbox of the Mozilla add-ons, meaning that you are required to register (free) and also configure your profile to allow the view of sandboxed extensions (=in early stage of development, about to get accepted). It is desired to to try out the extension and write a short review. This will help to get the extension accepted as official add-on to the masses.
Many thanks to Athanasios!
p.s.
There is an existing Russian version of the extension. It is expected that other languages will follow.
The OLPC and Greek
(oh, I am writing this through a lousy Net connection; thanks Engelados)
I tried out the latest OLPC image, specifically build 218, on Qemu and my aim was to get Greek support configured, if it was not there already.
The OLPC does not currently come with a good set of Greek fonts; you will need to install a set of fonts such as DejaVu or GFS Didot.
Installing means adding the font files in the directory /usr/share/fonts/. The current font configuration files in the OLPC favour Bitstream Vera, therefore you would need to move the bitstream subdirectory outside the fonts directory. DejaVu is based on Bitstream Vera and therefore you will not notice any change once you upgrade. Also, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu Linux are based on DejaVu. You need DejaVu, as Bitstream Vera does not currently support Greek. Both DejaVu and GFS Didot are free and open-source fonts.
Note: This screenshot shows DejaVu Sans, not GFS Didot. Sorry for the typo.
This is the OLPC running the cut-down version of the Abiword wordprocessor. Click on the image to view the full size.
This is the OLPC showing the same document above with GFS Didot. The font looks quite nice and similar to old greek textbooks. There is a small issue however, it does not have the character coverage of DejaVu. For example, notice that the Euro sign is missing from GFS Didot. Also, other glyphs such as fancy bullet characters are missing as well. Normally, the OLPC software should replace those missing characters with the correct characters from another font. Apparently something is wrong here and needs further investigation.
Writing support for the Greek language has to be configured separately in the OLPC. The case with other languages appears to be that the default layout is that of the language; apparently there is no need to switch between Brazilian Portuguese and English. For the Greek language it appears that it is good to be able to switch between Greek and English.
There are several places that you can add Greek writing support. The most common is in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Having gone through the configuration files, I think that /etc/X11/Xkbmap is also a good place and saves us from touching the core Xorg configuration file.
To write the full set of Greek letters, one needs to set the extended variant for the Greek layout, and also try to set the Compose key (for ano teleia). These things should be simplified...
I am not sure how the OLPC looks like (the only photos I saw where not focusing on the keyboard). Perhaps it would be useful to have a test machine at my disposal (hint, hint).
Jim Gettys wrote at his blog about the different languages that the first generation of the OLPC should support. Both Kinyarwanda and Kiswahili use the latin alphabet, therefore there are no significant issues with font support or writing support.
p.s.
Greece will carry out a pilot with OLPC laptops next September.
Can you read Coptic?
Coptic is the most recent phase of ancient Egyptian. It is the direct descendant of the ancient language written in Egyptian hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts. The Coptic alphabet is a slightly modified form of the Greek alphabet, with some letters (which vary from dialect to dialect) deriving from demotic. As a living language of daily conversation, Coptic flourished from ca. 200 to 1100. The last record of its being spoken was during the 17th century. Coptic survives today as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Egyptian Arabic is the spoken and national language of Egypt today.
Source: Wikipedia on Coptic Language
Coptic, as used today, has signs of influence from the Greek language. If you speak Greek, you should be able to recognise every entry in the screenshot (it comes from the dictionary that is available from http://copticlang.bizhat.com/).
There is a Coptic Unicode block and there are at least three Unicode fonts available with Coptic glyphs.
I am not aware of a keyboard definition to write Unicode Coptic; Coptic uses several combining diacritical marks (accents) and appears to surpass even Ancient Greek/Polytonic in this respect. An easy way to create (easy to write with?) method would be to start from the Greek keyboard layout and replace the codepoints with the Coptic ones. For the 9 combining diacritical marks, three keys should be dedicated, accessible through 1) pressing as is, 2) pressing with shift, 3) pressing with Alt. To avoid using dead keys, there would be a requirement to type first the letter and then the diacritical mark.
In modern Greek we use the ";:" key (on the right of L) to produce the acute and the diaeresis (with Shift) accents. The second suitable key could be the ' " key while the third the "/?" (debateable).
There are several efforts to convert non-Unicode fonts distributed by the Coptic Church. website. Moheb added the Coptic glyphs to the Freefonts. There is more work required to get them added by default to Linux distros. There is a discussion forum on Coptic.
Therefore, the most important task is to create a keyboard layout so that one can write in Unicode Coptic.
Then, existing (non-Unicode) text should be converted to Unicode Coptic so that there is material available. Moheb created support for this in iconv (glibc). There should be a bug report at http://sources.redhat.com/bugzilla/ under product glibc, component libc.
Source: Wikipedia (Coptic script)
There exist free Unicode fonts already to have the text displayed. The conversion of the Coptic Church fonts to Unicode would be beneficial as well. To have them included in Linux distros, the distribution license should be set to one of the FLOSS licenses. An option could be to add to the DejaVu fonts (allowed by the license) so that there is a general purpose open font that is easy to work with.
I, for one, would love to write Greek using a Coptic keyboard layout and a Coptic Unicode font. 
Update: Screenshot that demonstrates how well Unicode Coptic fonts behave when combining marks are used.
Update #2: You can test the above on your system by opening this OpenDocument file using OpenOffice.org or any other OpenDocument-compatible application. OpenOffice.org was verified that it can show combining marks. Your mileage may vary, your comments will be appreciated.
Keyboard updates in Xorg
There have been a few updates in Xorg regarding the multilingual keyboard support.
First, a new dead key has been added for Finish, dead_stroke. It appears that Cyrillic would find it useful as the available dead keys are too few to be reused in this case. The moral of the story is that if you want to add a dead_key, justify the necessity and it can be added.
Second, the Compose file nls/en_US.UTF-8/Compose.pre has been updated so that any Unicode keysyms have a value over 0x100000 (if keysym is Unicode keysym and had value < 0x100000, add 0x100000 to its current value). You will not see the change in the previous URL (which shows that CVS only); the updated Compose file is in git.
Third, there was an addition of the Braille input method which closed bug #6296. Braille is already available in the Unicode standard.
Thanks to Daniel Stone for going through these patches.
To get your daily fix on changes applied to Xorg, see the web-based interface to git.
Update (6Feb07): The new location of the compose file is http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=xorg/lib/libX11.git;a=tree;f=nls
How to write special characters in Xorg and GNOME
There is functionality in Xorg that allows type special characters, without having to switch to a specific keyboard layout. To enable,
- Click System, Preferences, Keyboard.
- Under Layout Options, expand on Compose key position.
- Choose Right-Win key is compose, click Close.
Now you can type extended characters using the RightWin key (next to AltGr), according to this keyboard settings file. Specifically, the lines that start with GDK_Multi_key are those that we can use here. The Compose key is actually GDK_Multi_key in the above file.
Some examples,
- RightWin + C + = produces €
- RightWin + = + C produces €
- RightWin + C + O produces ©
- RightWin + O + C produces ©
- RightWin + a + ' produces á
- RightWin + a + " produces ä
- RightWin + a + ` produces à
- RightWin + a + ~ produces ã
- RightWin + a + * produces å
- RightWin + a + ^ produces â
- RightWin + a + > produces â
- RightWin + a + , produces ą
- RightWin + e + - produces ē
- RightWin + S + 1 produces ¹
- RightWin + S + 2 produces ²
- RightWin + S + 3 produces ³
For more tips, see EasyLinux - Ubuntu Dapper.
February stats (Planet FLOSS Cyprus/Greece)
February has been a good month for Planet FOSS Cyprus/Greece.
Over 2100 unique visitors visited, producing over 18000 page hits and taking up 3.2GB of bandwidth.
Most of the visitors arrive early in the afternoon with some big peaks between 15:00 and 18:00.
The majority of the visitors come from Greece (around 50%) while a good proportion visits from Cyprus.
This month's unique domain name captured in the stats is an .aero domain.
The top two search engine bots were GoogleBot and the one from Inktomi.
165 visitors arrived to the page about setting up the keyboard in GNOME, though only 117 had Flash installed . There is a mirror now at GNOME.gr.
Still there are visitors that view the old Hoary tutorials to get Greek support. Most of these hacks have been fixed in Ubuntu, so they the tutorials are not very valid anymore. I added some comments on the pages on this.
Windows users account to half of the visitors. Linux users are the remaining one third. I think I can also see Giorgos Keramidas visiting with FreeBSD. There is a person connecting with his/her Solaris box and some credits were spent on a Symbian-powered mobile phone too.
The lizard is reinging with over 60%; the IE share is a mere 19%. A Motorola and a Nokia phone were detected, as well as a phone/PDA that uses the WebCollage browser (?).
Biggest referers have been http://bizwriter.blogspot.com and http://www.ellak.gr.
Among the strange search engine strings given to come here, I encountered μαμά μην τρέχεις κύπρος (mum, don't drive fast), freefont mazda and τροχοσπιτα (caravans).
Greek layout code in Xorg
The current X.org source uses gr instead of el for the Greek layout.
The change took place 19 months ago, according to
http://cvs.freedesktop.org/xlibs/xkbdesc/symbols/gr?view=log
in an attempt to introduce consistency in the layout names.
There is currently a discussion at
Unofficial Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) Starter Guide
Ο οδηγός του Ubuntu 5.10 είναι διαθέσιμος από την ιστοσελίδα http://easylinux.info/wiki/UbuntuΑποτελεί ενημέρωση του ubuntuguide.org του Chua Wen Kiat.
Πρόσθεσα τα
How to add keyboard layouts for other languages
How to add the Keyboard Layout Indicator applet
How to type extended characters
Τι περισσότερο μπορεί να μπει στον οδηγό;
Γράψιμο ελληνικών στο Linux (X.org), περί προσθήκης διορθώσεων
Το λογισμικό X.org (δυνατότητα για την απεικόνιση γραφικού περιβάλλοντος σε Linux) βρίσκεται σε μια μεταβατική περίοδο, που κάνει αρκετά δύσκολη την ενημέρωση της δυνατότητας γραψίματος ελληνικών.
Συγκεκριμένα, υπάρχουν δύο συστήματα για το γράψιμο στην τοπική γλώσσα, το παλιό και το καινούριο. Λόγω της μετάβασης, δεν γίνονται ενημερώσεις στο παλιό σύστημα. Λόγω της μετάβασης, το νέο σύστημα θα ενεργοποιηθεί κάποια στιγμή στο μέλλον, διότι (το νέο σύστημα για το γράψιμο) δεν είναι τμήμα της μετάβασης.
Το νέο σύστημα είναι το xkeyboard-config, από τους Sergey Udaltsov και Ivan Pascual.
Έτσι, θα χρειαστεί να ενημερωθεί ξανά το σφάλμα Comma error in greek keyboard (arithmetic keypad) #3538 για το νέο σύστημα.
Ακόμα, η σχεδιαζόμενη αναβάθμιση για το γράψιμο στο πολυτονικό σύστημα, για το οποίο εργάζεται ο Κώστας Πιστιόλης και γίνεται συζήτηση στη λίστα i18ngr, οι αλλαγές πρέπει να είναι στο νέο σύστημα, το οποίο περιμένουμε να γίνει διαθέσιμο στην αμέσως επόμενη έκδοση του λογισμικού X.org.
Ενημέρωση: Έστειλα γράμμα για lobbying στο X.org.
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