9fans archive / 2000 / 08 / 90 / prev next From: Steve Harris <scharris@wor...> Subject: Re: [9fans] pipefile input method Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 22:02:48 -0500 On Wed, 02 Aug 2000 16:19:35 rob pike wrote: > Thus I wrote pipefile, with > the belief that someone would write the obvious bytestream converter, > with or without modes, that would convert a standard keyboard into > some other style of input. I'm trying! I'll be finishing a basic Korean input method this weekend probably, and pipefile provides exactly what I asked about originally, a "stream filter" over /dev/cons. I didn't understand Dennis's reply about "kbd" in v2 and the qualms he had about notes handling if one were to just use a filter over cons. But after seeing rio running over a "tr" filter with pipefile, I know it will work now. The code will also be much simpler with Plan9 than it was with the (luxurious) Qt toolkit on Linux where I originally did it. The only real problem I see is we need a good "go" key, which tells the IM that the user is done with the keystrokes so it's time to convert them to an ideograph. The IM can't usually tell by itself unless the user hits space bar to start a new word, or has entered a full 4 strokes. The problem is that 1) all of the unshifted keys are taken by the IM itself, 2) it's too awkward to do CTRL-<something> or SHIFT-<something> all the time, and 3) the cons isn't in raw mode (by choice) so we can't just use something like CAPS-LOCK. It's not a do or die issue but it could be an annoyance. The other real problem is I need to find a Korean unicode font that works on Plan 9! What font format(s) are compatable? I've seen some of the asian font directories (not Korean, but sometimes there's overlap), but most of them don't work for me. E.g. the fonts in the /lib/font/bit/gb/ directory: % font=/lib/font/bit/gb/<any from this dir> % rio imageinit: can't open font /lib/font/bit/gb/<...> : bad format for font file (I did find some Japanese fonts in the pelm directory which worked.) -Steve