April 7, 2011
xkb keyboards on iBus
A few days ago, Dipankarda forwarded a request from a friend who was trying to figure out why certain fonts looked garbled on Fedora 14. In the process, we found that there were a couple of other keyboards for Bengali that could be added from iBus Preferences – ‘India-Bengali’ and ‘Bangladesh’. With a little tinkering around with Parag Nemade, it turned out to be an enhancement, which allows keyboards from xkbmaps to be integrated with iBus.
The ‘India-Bengali’ keymap is the default/first layout in the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/in file, while ‘Bangladesh’ keyboard is being generated from the /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/bd file. The first is a version of Inscript, while the latter seems to be based upon the Bijoy layout. However, there was one more layout for Bengali (ben_probhat) in the same file (/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/in ) which does not get added to the list of available keyboards. Could be a bug or a feature. To get these keyboards, its necessary to have the xkeyboard-config package installed as well. However, both of them may need to be reviewed.
A more detailed version of things are available in Fujiwara’s blog post.
kalyan kr das said,
April 7, 2011 at 5:44 pm
I find Bangladesh key board is ‘National Bangla/Bengali Standard Keyboard Layout for Bangladesh’ a three laired key board , 3rd layer is right-alt. Thanks for your endevour to one of the problems I pointed out to Dipankarda.
runa said,
April 7, 2011 at 5:53 pm
It is, but its a very old revision… 2006. You may have noticed that there could be issues related to ৎ . Btw.. here is a quick hack image of the layout:
http://runab.fedorapeople.org/images/bd-xkb.png
kalyan kr das said,
April 7, 2011 at 7:19 pm
See, to type য-ফলা, ই, ঈ, উ.ঊ, এ, ঐ,ও etc you have to press right alt key. So it is a trouble some . In unijoy / bijoy most of the works are done in two layers – normal & shift. I request you to see the particular problem related with unijoy key board ( crashing of open office writer at typing of ঁ on the head of জো) ।
kalyan kr das said,
April 8, 2011 at 6:59 am
here you will find ৎ at right alt+k. You will find the full image of the Bangladesh layout at http://kalyanbhattanagar.blogspot.com
ফেডোরা ১৪-র আইবাসের বাংলাদেশ কি-বোর্ডের লে-আউট
runa said,
April 8, 2011 at 9:27 am
Its not an iBus layout. Its the xkb layout that iBus interprets. Also, I am now completely lost with all the mail and comments. Lets track it all in one place. Thanks :)
fujiwara said,
April 26, 2011 at 8:34 am
Nice article ;)