[Project-ideas] Bengali keyboard layout for mobile devices

[Chinmay Dabral]

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply, but I've been busy with my college assignments
and I didn't want to reply until I had something to show.

I stayed the night and implemented a basic keyboard. I wanted to implement
a basic InScript layout keyboard because that seems to be the standard. But
I had a couple of problems:
1- Android 4.0 isn't displaying Indic characters, at least the emulator
isn't. I don't have a physical 4.0 device to test with. The documentation
says you can have a unicode character for a key code.
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/inputmethodservice/Keyboard.Key.html#attr_android:codes
But it says it can't recognize the key code. I also tried displaying a
String with Indic characters, but it displays a blank.
2- My Galaxy S has Hindi fonts, so I tried on that. But the problem is, it
still doesn't recognize key codes with unicode. It displays Strings with
unicode just fine though. So a part of the system understands unicode but a
part doesn't?
Please feel free to point out if I'm missing something here. I'm guessing
the emulator doesn't ship with suitable fonts, but I'm not sure why it
doesn't recognize unicode key codes.
So what I'm currently doing is generating key codes for normal Latin
characters and intercepting them, then generating a String with the
required unicode character and committing it to the input area. This isn't
elegant at all.

Here's a screenshot of the keyboard:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/DUY9A-JXF6yiTHoqOwQ-FlBo0-UkUYGi74FwL7GNJM8?feat=directlink

Also, checked out Indic typing booster, but haven't installed it yet and
don't yet have a proper idea of how it works. I saw the table file in the
source and it seems it performs a lookup into a table of words and their
Latin transliterations. The website says it supports InScript layout as
well, which would indicate it supports direct unicode entry as well as
transliterations. It would be great to be able to integrate it with the
keyboard.

Thanks,
Chinmaya Dabral
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