Fun with Fontforge, Graphite, and OpenOffice.org (has video)

[Guitarplayer II]

See this video.

[Torco]

Awesome, man. May I ask why didn't you use FontForge to make the font work? it has dynamic substitution capabilities, tho' OTOH maybe not as powerful as grafite

[Guitarplayer II]

Um, no, all the magic happens with Graphite. I just made the font in Fontforge and then compiled the magic in

[Morrígan]

Awesome, man. May I ask why didn't you use FontForge to make the font work? it has dynamic substitution capabilities, tho' OTOH maybe not as powerful as grafite

That's all Opentype; the standard has support for these features, but most software doesn't actually implement them.

[Guitarplayer II]

but most software doesn't actually implement them.

Right, that was the problem. I tried it several times but without success, so I had a look at the other system. And I misread your question, Torco, sorry.

Also, what the hell is that at ~4:07 Am I suffering of Tourette's now, randomly uttering swearwords under my breath in English?! I guess that should've been "consonants" but I changed my mind mid-word. Whatever, now it's in there.

[Io]

You mean that part that sound like 'cunt'? It sounds like you're mispronouncing something.

[Guitarplayer II]

You mean that part that sound like 'cunt'?

Yes.

It sounds like you're mispronouncing something.

Phew.

[jal]

See this video.

I get nauseaus looking at your mouse cursor. Please next time first look where you want to go with it, then do it, not make random spastic movements :).


JAL

[Richard W]

There was mention of an IME. Are you working on a serious one, or are you using something simple such as KMFL? (KMFL = Keyman for Linux, though there is now the free alternative Ekaya to Tavultesoft Keyman on Windows.) If you don't mind using the backing store character order and don't mind dead keys, you can use MSKLC for small BMP scripts on Windows. (MSKLC seems unusable for large scripts - it was a pain just using it for simple cuneiform numbers.)

I have found it useful to use Graphite to create a transliteration font - I've used it to check what I've actually typed in in the complex (but smallish) script.

[Jipí]

There was mention of an IME. Are you working on a serious one, or are you using something simple such as KMFL?

Hm, no. I said that I wanted to try and use Graphite like an IME, by means of its substitution function. This might've gone a little quick in the video. So what I have is a list of LATIN LETTER → U+E0... correspondences, so that the Latin-script letters I enter on my keyboard get dynamically replaced (at the surface, the underlying codepoints remain unchanged) by their counterparts in my script. So I guess what I'm trying to make is more appropriately called a self-transcribing font than an IME, essentially what you said you tried to make yourself as well.

(KMFL = Keyman for Linux, though there is now the free alternative Ekaya to Tavultesoft Keyman on Windows.)

Thanks for the hint. Although it seems a little buggy, I'm content with using UIM right now; also I'm on Ubuntu, and Ekaya seems to be a Windows program. I think I've also figured out now why UIM didn't recognize the modification of the uim-ipa-x-sampa package I made when I stored the modifications in a new file: I probably forgot to register it with uim-module-manager.

(MSKLC seems unusable for large scripts - it was a pain just using it for simple cuneiform numbers.)

MSKLC is less sophisticated than .XCompose and all the niceties Linux includes. Hence programs like KeyMan.

I have found it useful to use Graphite to create a transliteration font - I've used it to check what I've actually typed in in the complex (but smallish) script.

I've recently tested my font in Firefox and a number of other programs, and found that dynamic replacement didn't work as I expected to, although I have the pango-graphite package installed. I don't know, however, whether that's a bug in my font (I'm trying to learn as I go), or a general incapability of the libraries provided by the package.

[Morrígan]

(KMFL = Keyman for Linux, though there is now the free alternative Ekaya to Tavultesoft Keyman on Windows.)

Thanks for the hint. Although it seems a little buggy, I'm content with using UIM right now; also I'm on Ubuntu, and Ekaya seems to be a Windows program. I think I've also figured out now why UIM didn't recognize the modification of the uim-ipa-x-sampa package I made when I stored the modifications in a new file: I probably forgot to register it with uim-module-manager.

It's a bit buggy, but only in a kill-and-restart-it kind of way, not in a restart-your-whole-computer way, which early versions of Keyman did.

I use an old Keyman on Windows and KMFL/SCIM on Ubuntu and I quite like. Never had any problems that couldn't be solved by killing and restarting SCIM.

[Richard W]

Although it seems a little buggy, I'm content with using UIM right now; also I'm on Ubuntu, and Ekaya seems to be a Windows program. I think I've also figured out now why UIM didn't recognize the modification of the uim-ipa-x-sampa package I made when I stored the modifications in a new file: I probably forgot to register it with uim-module-manager.

I mentioned Ekaya because it promises to enable one's efforts to be used on Windows. (I haven't tried it, but Burmese is probably a fair test of it.) Graphite fonts finally have standard Open Office support on Windows, but Tavultesoft Keyman keyboards can no longer be free to Windows users.

The Ubuntu Lucid Lynx default of the ibus IM has been very developer-friendly. Whenever one restarts a KMFL keyboard (or whatever the term is), the latest source file is compiled and loaded, so not only did I not need to log out, I didn't even have to restart OpenOffice Writer. However, I still haven't worked out what's going on with different keyboards at the X keyboard level. Switching from an ASCII keyboard to a Thai keyboard has quite different effects on the IM behaviour depending on whether I'm using xterm or rxvt.

[zoqaëski]

Although it seems a little buggy, I'm content with using UIM right now; also I'm on Ubuntu, and Ekaya seems to be a Windows program. I think I've also figured out now why UIM didn't recognize the modification of the uim-ipa-x-sampa package I made when I stored the modifications in a new file: I probably forgot to register it with uim-module-manager.

How exactly does that work? I installed UIM so I could add some extra keybindings, but nothing shows up except for the default bindings and layouts that UIM comes with. All I wanted to do was modify my ~/.XCompose ...

[finlay]

Just because it bugged me sufficiently, /ˈgrafait/ rather than /grəˈfait/!

I wasn't entirely sure what you were doing with the video, anyway. Maybe I will if I ever get a sufficiently complicated conscript.

[Jipí]

All I wanted to do was modify my ~/.XCompose ...

Don't need UIM for ~/.XCompose. You may have to activate the compose key in your keyboard settings for that file to work, though.



If you want to use UIM on top of that, here is a guide about how to make it the default input method so that non-GTK applications can use it as well. In Ubuntu, the module export stuff goes into ~/.gnomerc to be loaded with Gnome. To use the X-SAMPA input method with UIM, you also need to install that package from the repos. Here's a modified version of the module that I made, because by default it only covers very basic stuff. You need to replace /usr/share/uim/ipa-x-sampa.scm with it. I think the proper way to register a module would be with uim-module-manager, but so far my replacement has worked nicely, except right-alt seems to break diacritics, which is why I had to remap some X-SAMPA equivalents.

Finlay: What I showed there turned out not to work the way I wanted anyway. If I should ever get round to work on that project again, I will have to program a keyboard layout thing to enter the characters directly. Having them dynamically replaced by entering Latin-alphabet keypoints only seems to work in a few programs, but not e.g. in Firefox, in spite of pango-graphite. Anyway, you'd have to have /ˈɡra.faɪt/ (thanks, I didn't know that) installed, and unfortunately this is only supported by very few programs, and support under Windows with Multiscribe is somewhat experimental AIUI.

[zoqaëski]

All I wanted to do was modify my ~/.XCompose ...

Don't need UIM for ~/.XCompose. You may have to activate the compose key in your keyboard settings for that file to work, though.

If you want to use UIM on top of that, here is a guide about how to make it the default input method so that non-GTK applications can use it as well. In Ubuntu, the module export stuff goes into ~/.gnomerc to be loaded with Gnome. To use the X-SAMPA input method with UIM, you also need to install that package from the repos. Here's a modified version of the module that I made, because by default it only covers very basic stuff. You need to replace /usr/share/uim/ipa-x-sampa.scm with it. I think the proper way to register a module would be with uim-module-manager, but so far my replacement has worked nicely, except right-alt seems to break diacritics, which is why I had to remap some X-SAMPA equivalents.

(I'm using Arch Linux and Openbox with GTK+ applications, no GNOME at present, so there's a few differences)

I've got UIM working as my default input method, and it came with more input methods than I'm ever likely to need. Compose was already activated (I have ~/.Xmodmap for that, which works quite nicely: CAPS LOCK is disabled and turned into a modifier key that lets me use Vim-style motions), but I wanted to remap some of the bindings, so I could extend it a bit with about a dozen or so characters I find I need to type fairly often that aren't mapped by default. Apparently UIM is meant to read your extensions in ~/.XCompose, but mine didn't. Now I'm trying to find out how layouts are defined by UIM so I can write or extend my own (the C-S-<code point> for Unicode is really useful but normally disabled, for example). Google isn't being particularly helpful, and the documentation on the UIM site seems a bit sparse.

[makvas]

Some day I might make a video showing my methods (basically, use inkscape).