new SI1452 keyboard layout

[Dotan Cohen]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 22:18, Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz> wrote:
> Hi Tzafrir, as well as anyone else who want to pursue this development
> independently.
>
> I think the community is having a hard time wrapping its head around a
> fundamental fact of the new keyboard standard. This is not an open source
> project. This is a committee. It is manned by people who are all with the
> best of intentions, and the discussion is surprisingly ego-free, and yet,
> this is still a committee, with all the negative association that go with
> that word. I'm doing my best to make the process open, but I'm beginning to
> ask myself whether I'm not, actually, causing more damage than good.
>
> In the end, the SII will issue a standard. Like it or not, this is what will
> get implemented on most computers out there. Ideally, this standard is what
> will get implemented on ALL computers out there. As such, I think it is best
> to try and make sure that this standard is as good as we can make it.
>
> However, since this is a committee standard, it takes time. The committee
> meets once a month, and for a few hours at a time (next meeting is
> tomorrow). There is so much progress we can make during one meeting (hence
> the lack of maqaf, gershaim, and other characters that exist in lyx but not
> in the current version of the draft). I completely understand people's
> impatience, but this is just how things are. It will likely take AT LEAST
> three more months to completely agree upon the keyboard, and AT LEAST one
> more month for the standard to reach the point where it is officially
> published to the public to receive comments. It is no news to me that, for
> an open source project, that speed is a crawl. There is positively nothing
> anyone can do about it, as far as I can tell.
>
> Creating forks and branches may lead to one of two outcomes, as far as I can
> see, neither desirable. The least bad outcome is that no-one will use your
> repo, and you would have wasted time and effort. The worst case, however, is
> that your repo is widely successful, but incompatible with the end standard.
> As such, I think it is best to keep the feedback flowing where the SII
> sub-committee can pick it up.
>
> Thankfully, Hamakor has a couple of representatives at the committee, and
> one of them (yours truly) did his best to make the process as transparent as
> possible. The best way to get your feedback considered by the committee
> (before reaching the public comments stage, that is) is by reading all the
> comments on the blog post Tzafrir pointed to, and then, if what you said is
> not redundant to what was already said, leave a comment with it. I think it
> is the only sane way to make sure your comments actually get considered by
> the standard while it is being drafted.
>

Hi Shachar. I notice that the RLM and LRM are not implemented in the
new keyboard layout. You might want to mention to the rest of the
committee that there exist users who use the lyx layout specifically
for those two most useful characters. Please, do not remove them!

Additionally, I would love to see the inclusion of the RTL (U+200F)
and LTR (U+200E) characters. In my opinion, the RLM and LRM could go
in place of the mostly-useless [ and ] keys, and the RTL and LTR could
go on the shifted version of those same keys. Those keys are only
really useful for programming, an activity that one does not do in the
Hebrew layout.

Thanks!

-- 
Dotan Cohen

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