[maemo-developers] Decoding virtual keyboard layout definition files (.vkb)

[From: Kimmo Jukarainen]

I wanted to make a couple of small changes to the Finnish virtual 
keyboard layout (for example, replace å and Å with / and |), but 
couldn't find enough documentation about the virtual keyboard to 
do that.

There are only few incomplete documents available about .vkb format, 
gen_vkb utility and it's XML input format, and I couldn't find even 
a single working example of the XML inputfile for gen_vkb. Let alone 
the sources for the current layout files available in the device.

So, I spend couple of hours reverse engineering the .vkb files and 
created a decode_vkb perl-script that decodes the binary .vkb files 
to XML files that can be edited and then converted back to binary 
with gen_vkb.

The script can currently decode all but one of the .vkbs in n800 to 
XML files that gen_vkb encodes back to original ones. It's available 
from my website along with some documentation:

   http://idoru.metadreams.net/~kimju/src/maemo/decode_vkb/

Of the missing features, I really would like to add support for 
modifier keys (mostly ctrl), but as the documentation is incomplete 
and no official .vkb uses this feature I'm not sure how it is 
even supposed to work. Any help would be appreciated and good and 
complete documentation for both the XML and binary vkb formats even 
more so.

-kimju