emk
commented
10 years ago Hello! I do welcome contributions.
I have no idea what's going on with inscript and itrans. I prefer to use ibus-m17n for dead languages, which involves creating very simple *.mim files and copying them into the correct directory.
If you're interested in runic scripts, you may want to take a look at the file more-for-later.xml, which contains all the information needed to construct 7 different runic keyboards for various time periods and countries. I did a bunch of research into this a few years ago and spent a lot of time figuring out how to map things as correctly as I could. The keys assigned to each rune as based on the conventions that are typically used to transliterate runic inscriptions using the Latin alphabet. At the very least, this data should be a good starting point. Unfortunately, these keyboards can't be used with Linux without being converted to *.mim format, which I haven't gotten around to yet.
To make these keyboards work on Linux, you would need to write a script which reads each of the mappings from the file more-for-latter.xml and generates individual *.mim files for them. (For a good example of what the output should look like, see coptic.mim.) Note that most of keyboards in more-for-latter.xml are actually based on other keyboards in that file, so it will be necessary to combine information from multiple sections of the file. Ideally the conversion script would be written in Ruby, but Haskell would also be perfectly acceptable.
Also, if you discover any errors in the runic keyboards, please feel free to suggest corrections.
Thank you very much for your interest in this project, and I hope the runic keyboard data will be of some help to you!
jimcrayne
Hello Eric,
I stumbled across your project while looking for an IBUS input method for runes. I see you are almost there, having charts etc, and I would be willing to help contribute, if that is welcome. I am an experienced software engineer, mostly I specialize in C++ and Haskell, but I do have at least some experience with lisp like languages, such as scheme.
The main thing is I do not know IBUS. In fact, If you do not mind, I have a question about m17n, that you might know the answer to. I see that the m17n package has a lot of mappings, sometimes marked inscript and sometimes marked itrans, and I have been wondering what do those tags signify?
PS: I am just beginning to learn Old Norse, and it would be nice to have keyboards to facilitate writing it using both the latin and runic scripts. I have noticed that not all the phonemes expressed in the latin script are expressed in the runic script.. So I can invision potentially multiple keyboards for runes... one which actually translates the latin script to Younger Futhark (in a lossy manner), and one which simply assigns a rune to each key. And of course, it would also be nice to be able to write midieval runes.