Bug 34576

Is that your personal layout - or perhaps you know a number of people who are actually using it?

Well, at least he was using this in a previous life... Unlike the last added four layouts (4!) that were included in the Romanian XKB file by some foreign Tatar contributor (did I mention they are four, meaning half of the total number?). I think they have no users whatsoever... :(

The layout is interesting for people that type a lot, but it is not a requirement for touch typing. I blind type with both official layouts from the 2004 Romanian standard. And if you want to go all the way in achieving optimal speed in typing, you should try something like this: http://www.invatasingur.ro/popak/ (a layout in the spirit of the Dvorak keyboard). But this also, doesn't see much use, so it doesn't merit to be included in XKeyboardConfig.

Thank you for CC'ing me! I wish someone did that when the Tatars have invaded the Romanian XKB file, I've just recently discovered that half of the Romanian layouts have nothing to do with Romania... Sergey, can we do something about that too?

Well, do not get me started about Tatar layouts, I had enough political b*shit in bug #19730 (feel free to discuss it with that contributor).

If you're saying that Tatar layouts are exotic for Romania - I am prepared to move them to the "exotic" section of xk-c. No problem (just file a separate bug please and make it blocked by #19730).

But that does not answer my question about this one. If there is just a small group of people using it - I'd move it to "exotic". If there is just a single person, I respectfully put it on hold.

In regards to this layout, I've never encountered it before and I've also typed about 12 books in a previous life... Gabriel, is this your creation?

In regards to the 4 Tatar abominations, I've been keeping bug #23544 open in a tab in my web browser for some weeks now, documenting myself about Romanian Tatars, asking for additional info from more knowledgeable persons. I think I have a strong case against including these layouts in the Romanian XKB file, I'll comment over there, no matter what that Tatar son of a bi*** has to say.

As for moving some of the Romanian layout to an exotic category, I think this would be a wonderful idea for the "winkeys" layout today and for the "cedilla" and "std_cedilla" layouts in a not-so-distant future. 

Thanks!

> In regards to the 4 Tatar abominations, I've been keeping bug #23544 open in a
> tab in my web browser for some weeks now, documenting myself about Romanian
> Tatars, asking for additional info from more knowledgeable persons. I think I
> have a strong case against including these layouts in the Romanian XKB file,
> I'll comment over there, no matter what that Tatar son of a bi*** has to say.
Well, I am very far from being in love with that guy (as you could notice), but please do not get personal. This bugzilla is for technical issues, ok?

> As for moving some of the Romanian layout to an exotic category, I think this
> would be a wonderful idea for the "winkeys" layout today and for the "cedilla"
> and "std_cedilla" layouts in a not-so-distant future. 
That's very sweet of you! It is not every day that people help me by asking to move things to "exotic" section.

(In reply to comment #5)
> Well, I am very far from being in love with that guy (as you could notice), but
> please do not get personal. This bugzilla is for technical issues, ok?

Sorry, I was venting some of the frustration that I've built in the last weeks, in which I've also repeatedly read in horror and disbelief the aforementioned discussions in FDo's Bugzilla.


> > As for moving some of the Romanian layout to an exotic category, I think this
> > would be a wonderful idea for the "winkeys" layout today and for the "cedilla"
> > and "std_cedilla" layouts in a not-so-distant future. 
> That's very sweet of you! It is not every day that people help me by asking to
> move things to "exotic" section.

The "winkeys" layout was used in Windows, up to and including the XP version. It was a much hated layout and the standard adopted in 2004 is quite different in a number of ways. Very few hardware keyboards with that quirky Romanian layout have been produced (by Comrace, around year 1999) and, given the less-than-optimal quality of the manufacturing, they should be out of service by now... So, please move that obsolete layout out of the way, less is more! :-)

> Sorry, I was venting some of the frustration that I've built in the last weeks,
> in which I've also repeatedly read in horror and disbelief the aforementioned
> discussions in FDo's Bugzilla.
I am glad that we feel similar about that kind of behavior, but still...

> by now... So, please move that obsolete layout out of the way, less is more!
> :-)
Absolutely! I will do that.

So, here's my story. While in college, back in the mid-90's in Timișoara, I worked for a publishing company (Eurobit SRL, IIRC) and a whole group of us were tasked with typing in various hand- or type-written manuscripts. Lots of literary critique type stuff, and some more science-y texts.

We used DOS and Win3.1 at the time. Windows had a "Romanian" layout based on what looked like a modified German keyboard (I *tought* Winkeys looked familiar :) ), but we all hated it, since it was really very poorly suited to the US keyboards we were using.

I believe one of us found something that looked more or less like the "standard" layout, but things got really confusing, since we frequently needed colons and semicolons (which collide with 'ș'. We also used curly and square brackets relatively frequently, often enough for the collision with 'ă' and 'â' to become an issue.

One person in the group brought up the idea that q, w, y, and k were really very infrequently encountered in written Romanian, and they were also immediately adjacent on the US keyboard to a, s, t, and i respectively. So how about making them into ă, ș, ț, and î ? That left â, which is less frequent than the rest, and could therefore be obtained with AltGr-A. Not sure where they got it from, but since I was the only "programmer" around, I wrote up a DOS TSR, and also a windows program which stole keypress events and made things happen. Those were the good old days :)

Anyway, we were cranking out roughly one book manuscript a week per person, and I worked there for about a year, before I graduated and moved on. I do remember seeing the windows version of my little hack somewhere outside that company a few months later (which made me smile with parental pride :) ). Not sure how far and wide it spread, if it's still in use, or if that company is still in business.

These days, I use linux exclusively, and would use native Romanian symbols mostly to impress my other Romanian buddies on IM :)

I simply thought this layout was a clever trick, found it immensely useful for high-volume fast typing of Romanian text, and thought I'd share it with the community (in the spirit of at least attempting to push potentially useful modifications upstream). I'd be OK with wherever this layout ends up (you guys mentioned 'exotic') as long as I can switch to/from it using 'setxkbmap'. I can always just patch it in during install via kickstart, but again -- I thought others might benefit from it if it's somewhere they get a chance to even see it in the first place :)

Thanks again,
--Gabriel

So I googled 'romanian keyboard layout', and within the first pageful of results there are two links leading to

http://www.ergoromanian.com/ersite/home.htm

They're selling an XP/Vista/Windows7 app very much similar to the one I wrote for Windows3.1 back in the day, which seems to indicate that the layout I am proposing is actually in wider use than I expected :)

Let me know if you think this qualifies the layout I submitted for the proper Romanian section, rather than "exotic".

Thanks much,
--Gabriel

I only find one entry on the second page with results from Google, but nevertheless it still is a valid point. But not a very strong one, given the fact that on the very first page I find some user layouts that would have no place whatsoever in the Romanian XKB file: http://wiki.andreineculau.com/Custom_Keyboard_Layouts_with_Romanian_Diacritics .

Please give me a few days to put this matter into discussion on the Diacritice[1] mailing list, a place with a lot of people involved in the Romanian localization. Cristian Secară, the godfather of the 2004 standard, is also very active on this list. I'll get back with the conclusions, Gabriel please join us if you do feel inclined. Thanks!

However, if there is an "exotic" sections in which the "winkeys" layout goes, this would at most be included in this "exotic" section. The only layout worthy of being included in the Romanian XKB file would be one that matches the Romanian hardware keyboards from Apple. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a hold of one of these devices to build and test such a layout.

 1. http://groups.google.com/group/diacritice

I've been reading about the "exotic" section in XKeyboardConfig (bug #21466) and I wonder if there is any change for the users for now... Is this implemented in any graphic tool that handles XKB layouts, so that the user doesn't see by default the extra/exotic layouts? Thanks.

Yes, it is up to GUI tools. For example, in gnome there is gconf/gsettings boolean flag - whether to show extended layouts or not ('load-extra-items')

By default it is set to false.

Ah, I have found now your commit in GNOME's log for libgnomekbd. It is only 9 days old and it hasn't propagated to my bleeding edge GNOME3 virtual test machine yet. So I wonder, will this also make it to the GUI as a + element which expands a list of supplementary layouts or something along the line? Or will this be just a hidden GSettings option?

From what I understand, it's up to the GUI to implement something like this, but I wonder if you know anything about the GNOME Control Center, which also happens to be the most common configuration tool... Thanks!

No, there is no GUI for that settings in gnome. It is just in GSettings. It was in Gconf.

Gabriel, I realize your layout predates the Romanian spelling reform of 1993
(or at least, its delayed adoption in the printing business). So letter  is
consigned to Alt-A, because if was so infrequently used before the reform. 

But nowadays  is much more prevalent, so in the name of consistency with the
RO basic layout (which assigns à to Alt-A and  to Alt-Q) what do you think
about swapping à and  in this ergonomic layout?

Even efter the spelling reform, Â is much less frequently used than Ă
(the example I used on the "diacritice" group was that of the Romanian
Wikipeda front page: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagina_principală,
where Ă shows up 95 times compared to Â, which appears only 16 times).

The idea behind this layout was to minimize the number of times one has to
use AltGr to reach a desired symbol. Even with the slightly increased
statistical frequency of Â, one is still much better off having quick and
easy access to Ă by mapping it to the Q key. If I had to pick which one
of the two I'd "hide" behind AltGr-A, I'd still clearly prefer that to be Â.

Thanks much,
--Gabriel

After several days of debates[1] on the "Diacritice" mailing list the only sure thing is we couldn't reach a consensus. There are PRO and CON arguments for including this layout, let me resume them:

  * this layout has some real users and it is also referenced on the Internet by a third party[1] (PRO)
  * it offers a speed advantage when typing in Romanian, with minimum change to the QWERTY layout (PRO)
  * it's a fairly exotic layout (CON)
  * there are too many layouts in the Romanian XKB file already, even when excluding the Tatar ones (CON).

Normally I would be against including this in the Romanian XKB layout, but given the fact that there is now an "extra" section for exotic layouts in XKeyboardConfig, I propose we include this layout there with the name "ergonomic".

Thank you Gabriel!

 1. https://groups.google.com/group/diacritice/browse_thread/thread/ffa915a76d3e5ad0#
 2. http://bucovina.chem.tue.nl/tastatura/taste.xmodmap.qwyk_104-UTF-8.htm

I am absolutely happy with that solution. Gabriel?

"ergonomic" in the "extra" section sounds great to me ! Will it end up being named "ro(ergonomic)" for setxkbmap purposes ? I am only curious, I'm fine with whatever naming convention you guys end up putting in place !

Thanks much,
--Gabriel

Ok, committed then.