Virtual multilingual keyboard

[Johnny Rosenberg]

2009/11/14 Johnny Rosenberg <gurus.knugum at gmail.com>:
> 2009/11/12 H.S.Rai <hardeep.rai at gmail.com>:
>> How I can enter UNICODE text in Indian language (Hindi Punjabi)? I
>> could see some parts of GUI and application in Punjabi. I have "Lohit
>> Punjabi" font installed and listed in OpenOffice as well as AbiWord.
>> On typing with Lohit Punjabi font, I still get ENGLISH typed, and not
>> punjabi. I cannot use special keyboard. I want to use normal keyboard
>> of laptop, or virtual keyboard. Is there any such keyboard? I tried
>> gok, but there appear no button to switch language / change keyboard.
>>
>> Please help.
>>
>> --
>> H.S.Rai
>
> I read that you solved your problem, so I will just add a short comment:
> Unicode (UTF-8 for example) contains tens of thousands of different
> characters. Most of them are not supported in an Ubuntu default
> install, so additional fonts need to be installed. When you do that,
> it means that some previous non supported characters now are
> supported. For example I installed a font for symbols for writing
> music. This has nothing to do with my keyboard layout. A is still an A
> and so on. The difference is that those UTF-8 characters that had
> nothing assinged to them now has. Since they are located at U+1D100 →
> U+1D1FF, I can still not reach them from my keyboard, unless I create
> my own keyboard layout (which I actually did…) or use some other
> method to reach them. That's why you still get the same kind of
> characters when typing. SCIM is a solution to that problem in your
> case. Another solution could be to swith to another keyboard layout,
> if there is one for those characters of yours.
>
> Johnny Rosenberg
>

Forgot to mention that all characters ARE reachable from the keyboard
always, but not conveniently… You can alway do Shift+Ctrl+u → release
keys → enter UTF-8 code, for example 1d123 → Hit ↵ (Enter).
Won't work in some applications. In Opera, for example, Ctrl+Shift+u
seems to mean the same as Ctrl+u which pops up a new tab showing the
source code of the current page…
But it works in GEdit, OpenOffice.org and a lot more.

Johnny Rosenberg