2012/3/31 Srikanth Lakshmanan <srik.lak(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 14:46, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Hi Wikimedians in India,
Recently i've been making improvements to the enhanced editing
toolbar, and especially to its "Special Characters" functionality.
Great!
Tamil isn't there in the extension, but I have some feedback / questions.
It was built into the editing toolbar with the release of the Vector
skin in early 2010. I don't really know how were the scripts and the
characters chosen for inclusion back then, but evidently it's not
perfect.
If you want to add Tamil, please open a bug about it or just patch
WikiEditor/modules/jquery.wikiEditor.toolbar.js
Does this aim to replace on-screen-keyboard?
Absolutely not. If anything, an on-screen keyboard will replace this
toolbar for most uses, although the toolbar will probably remain as a
simple "last resort" thing. It should be (kinda) complete and usable,
but it's not supposed to be perfectly convenient.
It would be suitable to have actual
special characters which either don't have key mappings on Narayam / other
standard input methods or those which people don't use frequently and hence
might not remember.
It's OK to have all the characters there and not just the very special
characters, as long as the regular characters are not getting in the
way the special characters too much. It's supposed to be useful for
people who know what they want to type, but don't know how to type it.
For example, if you are comfortable typing Tamil using Narayam or a
keyboard layout that your operating system provides, and you want to
use this toolbar to type some rare Tamil characters that are not found
in your usual layout, and it's inconvenient because it has too many
characters and the character that you need is hard to find, then this
is a bug that should be filed under the WikiEditor extension. (The
example is of course imaginary, because Tamil is not supported at
all.)
I see Telugu, Bengali already have their char set, and
Marathi filed a
bug[2],
Marathi is already supposed to be supported in the Devanagari section.
If the Devanagari section is not good enough for Marathi, then it is a
bug.
The bug to which you are pointing is proposing to use this toolbar in
a very different way. That will be addressed in a different extension
that is being designed now.
but the list of languages / order isn't
configurable per project,
which means if Marathi gets added tomorrow, they have to scroll down the
list and is unlikely to be very usable at least in Marathi projects since
few people may scroll down and use it to input.
It's useful to have all the languages in all the projects, although
some customization may be convenient. For example, putting the scripts
that are most useful for a certain project at the top. If anybody has
ideas for that, then that's exactly the kind of thing that i want to
hear.
Other than being a first class citizen and being up
within the editor, what
difference does this have against Mediawiki:Edittools ?
Edittools is too customizable - it doesn't offer anything out of the
box. So every project that uses, has something different. Some
projects copy the configuration from friendly projects (Ukrainian from
Russian, for example). It's actually a very interesting process to
learn, because it may tell a thing or two about the needs of every
language. And of course, don't underestimate the "first class citizen"
part :)
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore