Program-specific keyboard input methods

Some programs, like yudit have their own keyboard mapping schemes. The keymaps used by yudit have a simple format, and are available as individual .kmap files in /usr/share/yudit/src. These can be modified system-wide, or by the individual user, with detailed instructions given in /usr/share/yudit/doc/HOWTO-keymap.txt. For example, we have modified the default Oriya-Inscript.kmap [41] to bring it more in line with the standard Inscript layout.

Before a .kmap layout can be used by yudit, it has to be converted to a binary .my format, using the mytool program that is installed along with yudit. Thus, after copying and modifiying Oriya-Inscript.kmap, an individual user could run

  mytool -type kmap -kmap Oriya-Inscript.kmap -rkmap Oriya-Inscript.kmap
    -write ~/.yudit/data/Oriya-Inscript.my

which would write /.yudit/data/Oriya-Inscript.my in the user's home directory. To make it available system-wide, copy /.yudit/data/Oriya-Inscript.my to /usr/share/yudit/data as super-user, replacing the old Oriya-Inscript.my.

I have tried to take a peek at what other keyboard input methods have been developed by various groups. I tried installing LISM [42] but was unsuccessful, even with help from the CDAC-GIST support group. I was more successful in using the software distributed by the Computer Science and Engineering department of IIT-Kanpur. Their Linux technology development project for Indian languages [43] offers a wide variety of software. Unfortunately, I have not yet had time to investigate these, apart from the locales mentioned in Sec. 4.3. Besides these, there are several other efforts to support Indian languages that would bear investigation.