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List:       xfree-i18n
Subject:    Re: [I18n] Utilities for changine keymap.
From:       Pablo Saratxaga <pablo () mandrakesoft ! com>
Date:       2000-07-19 18:16:51
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Kaixo!

On Wed, Jul 19, 2000 at 11:37:50AM -0600, Andy Bradford wrote:

> > xkbcomp can be used if you can figure it out. 
> > 
> >   xkbcomp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/keymaps/xfree86 -m it :0
> > 
> > Should get you started.
> 
> Yes, this works great.  I had been using xmodmap to do this, but this 
> required that I had an expression map for every language.

s/language/keyboard layout/g


The files are descriptions of *keyboard layouts* they are *NOT* tied 
to any human language.

It is a common misconception to think of keyboards as tied to languages
(and that as lead to a complete mess in the naming of those files);
but they are not.

A single language (eg French or English) can use different keyboard layouts;
and a signle keyboard layout can be used by different languages.

The keyboard layouts are tied to geographic areas (market segmentation),
so it would make much more sense to use country naming rather than language
naming.

Any automation program that will set the keyboard layout based solely on the
user language will leave easuily 40-60% of the users with an unusable
keyboard layout (on the PC; on machines like the sparc etc that will easily
be 80-90% of the people... All the sparcstations I saw have an US keyboard;
however they were all wrking in French language...)

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975

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