Bug 31658

How would you estimate the number of existing users?

IIRC at some point there were talks about pan-EU layout. Could you provide some info about alternative approaches, comparing with your idea?

(In reply to comment #1)
> IIRC at some point there were talks about pan-EU layout. Could you provide some
> info about alternative approaches, comparing with your idea?

You are right. There is for example another layout by Karl Pentzlin¹ who is involved in the CEN Workshop on “Functional Multilingual Extensions to European Keyboard Layouts” (WS/MEEK)², where CEN means “Comité Européen de Normalisation” or in English “European Committee for Standardization”, the equivalent to the ISO for Europe. I think before we have a dozen Pan-European keyboard layouts in Xorg we should wait a bit for the developement and decisions the WS/MEEK makes.

For that we or the author of this bug could write to Marc Wilhelm Küster, the chair of CEN/ISSS Cultural Diversity Focus Group³, or to Erkki Kolehmainen, the chair of MEEK, who are involved into this topic.

Best regards,
Erik

¹) http://europatastatur.de
²) http://www.csc.fi/english/pages/meek
³) http://www.cdfg.org

For me, Eric's idea looks reasonable. What do you think, Anton?

(In reply to comment #3)
> For me, Eric's idea looks reasonable. What do you think, Anton?

I would agree with Eric. Thus we can postpone this request. I believe that having a standard layout is prefered and it make sense to wait for it to be ready. 

The only issue that I possibly see is for the quotes not to be deadkeys. I am not sure if CEN considers it, will have to find out. As a programmer I hate to type a space each time I enter a quote - a common issue for int layouts when used by programmers. 

Please decide if we want to close this ticket. I am ok with closing it.

Sorry for reviving this old thread, but what is the status of this request? Is there some European layout added?

I also vote for adding the EurKEY layout, as it is - in contrast to the "Europatastatur" layout - US based, so very convenient for coders and translators. As far as I understand the Final CWA from Dec 2009 of CEN/ISSS, they do not propose a single European layout, but describe this as an ongoing process. Annex 2 "Global Input Method" talks about the trade-off between having same key positions on all foreign keyboards and most needed characters easy to use but on different positions. The EurKEY follows the latter path obviously.
As about the user base, searching Google for "european keyboard" pops up Steffen Brüntjen's page as the third result.

I attached a patch adding a slightly modified version of the EurKEY layout (US based with Euro on 5). The layout is added with symbol "eu" (exceptionally reserved in ISO 3166-1 alpha 2). My approach here having a new "eu" base layout is, that other variants for European layouts may be added (UK-based, FR-based or DE-based like the "Europatastatur"), this should also be in compliance with the CEN/ISSS. Of course it is subject of discussion if the EurKEY layout should be the "basic" layout, but some basic layout is needed.

Maybe this helps moving forward with European layouts in general. What do you think?

Thanks. Best regards

christoph

Created attachment 90871 [details] [review]
Patch for EurKEY, European keyboard layout

(In reply to comment #6)
> Created attachment 90871 [details] [review] [review]
> Patch for EurKEY, European keyboard layout
What would be your estimation of the user base of that layout?

(In reply to comment #7)
> What would be your estimation of the user base of that layout?

To be honest, I have no idea. 
I might point Steffen Brüntjen to this thread, and he might provide some download statistics of the layout.
We also might ask Cherry, how often they sell the "US English with EURO symbol" keyboards in Europe, but I assume this is classified information.

What is the proposed way to find out an estimation of the user base of a layout?

Well, there is no standard approach here. I usually trust any ballpark estimations. Sometimes people do voting on some national linux-specific sites. Sometimes they provide download figures. Anything, within common sense...

Basically, my aim is to establish if the demand significant enough for the layout to be included into base.xml.in or it is too exotic, so should be in base.extras.xml.in.

I contacted the author of EurKEY eight days ago, but as of now got no response. If you are still willing to include the layout based on my meager request, I am fine putting the layout into base.extras.xml.in.

With regards to my patch, when testing it on Arch Linux I noticed that the symbols/eu file is not copied to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols on a fresh system when building xkeyboard-config. I forgot to add the file in symbols\Makefile.am and symbols\Makefile.in. If needed I can fix this and provide a new patch.

Ok, let's put it to base.extras.xml.in - and pls add it to Makefile.am

Steffen, the author of EurKEY, send me a response e-mail two days ago. First he accepts the change to set the Eurosign and Cent on key 5 (like most US layouts with Eurosign). So my change will match his layout, and it will be consistent on Linux, Windows and Mac.

With regards to download statistics he admitted to not have sufficient data. The Windows installer has been downloaded about ~60 times Nov/Dec 2013. The Debian package has been fetched about 1,000 times in Dec 2013, however he added that every 'apt-get update' might boost this access as well.

I am currently discussing the final short description and description with him and I hope to deliver the patch latest on Sunday this week.

I know there is a scheduled feature freeze on 01/14, so I obviously will not make it into 2.11.

Created attachment 93053 [details] [review]
[PATCH] EurKEY keyboard layout

Sorry for the delay. Attached find the patch "EurKEY keyboard layout" based on Release 2.11.

Fine. committed. Thank you!

Just one thing - are you sure that the only language is eng?

(In reply to comment #14)
> Just one thing - are you sure that the only language is eng?
When discussing this with Steffen, he said that the EurKEY layout used to be included invasive in many European languages, like dan, eng, fin, ger, gre, ita, nor, por, spa, swe etc.¹ We decided with the European layout to only put the layout in an European section. There is a code for the European Union within ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, namely EU², but I could not find anything for Europe within the ISO 639 codes³. So I decided to add the layout only to the base layout US-English.
On second thought your are right, I should go back to the original list, if you also do not find it to invasive. What do you think?
(Btw, if I change this, should the patch be based on the already committed EurKEY layout or just base on the latest 2.11 release?)


¹) See full list at http://eurkey.steffen.bruentjen.eu/download.html
²) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#Decoding_table
³) http://www-01.sil.org/iso639-3/codes.asp

Since your original patch is already committed, you should base on it please.

Created attachment 93385 [details] [review]
EurKEY keyboard layout: languageList update

Assuming that you do not find the original list to invasive, attached is the patch "EurKEY keyboard layout: languageList update" based on commit 136e211. Thanks again for accepting this layout and resolving the request.

Thanks, committed. Had to remove all those \n\ strings;)

Created attachment 93486 [details] [review]
EurKEY keyboard layout: languageList update (fixed)

Oh sorry, my bad. I copied this list from upstreams Debian script, but obviously did not pay enough attention. For reference reasons I replaced the false formatted patch with a fixed one.
Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

This layout is licensed under GPLv3 rather than MIT as the rest of them.

Can this please be changed? Thanks.

I removed the GPLv3 line. If the author is not happy, I will have to remove that variant.

Thanks Sergey.  Could you do the same for #31073?

Yes, I do accept that change. Thanks for your great work!