[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Bluetooth keyboard update

[From: Aaron Levinson]

I seriously doubt that this problem has anything to do with the Hildonized
GTK+, considering that special characters such as the German umlaut work
fine in my VNC viewer port (at least with the virtual keyboard).  In
addition, an examination of the xterm implementation will demonstrate that
it makes significant use of GTK, and this is likely the case for Opera as
well.

More likely, the problem is due to an improper implementation of the 
signal handlers for the input method's "commit" and possibly 
"preedit-changed" signals.  The strings passed to these input handlers, at 
least for the hildon-im-context (virtual keyboard) and handwriting input 
methods are in UTF-8 format, and while a simple parse of the string as if 
each character is a byte long will work for many characters, it won't work 
for multibyte characters such as the umlaut.

Another possibility is that the BT keyboard input method is passing a 
string with a different format (i.e. not UTF-8) to "commit" and 
"preedit-changed" signal handlers.  This seems like a real possibility, 
because when the notes application is used with the virtual keyboard and 
special characters are used, these special characters display fine.

One final possibility is that there is no requirement for the format of
the string passed to the "commit" and "preedit-changed" signal handlers of
input methods.  The GTK API documentation is limited for this class, but
there is some limited mention of UTF-8 in the documentation for some
methods, such as gtk_im_context_get_surrounding().

Aaron Levinson

On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, Simon Budig wrote:

> That as well. I just wonder what crack the Notetaking application has
> smoked to ignore the german umlauts. As you've noted on your homepage
> they work in Opera and xterm, so it seems to be the fault of the
> Hildonized GTK+ (they don't work in the GPE-PIM stuff either).