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

[From: Quim Gil]

Thanks for your time going 'beyond'.

So we have got
http://maemo.org/development/documentation/how-tos/3-x/howto_him_bora.html

Any feedback on how to improve this document is appreciated, more if it
comes in the form of bug reports / RFE at bugs.maemo.org (product
'website', component 'documentation').

btw, in the wiki someone created 
http://maemo.org/community/wiki/howtoinputmethod770/ and even
http://maemo.org/community/wiki/howto_setupkeyboard/
that seem to need some fresh look and love.

Any hint about the usefulness of these documents today is also well
receive (by me) since I'm going through
http://maemo.org/community/wiki/wikireorg/ these days (if you want to
help...)



On Tue, 2007-08-21 at 18:23 +0300, ext Kimmo Jukarainen wrote:
> 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.

-- 
Quim Gil - http://maemo.org