I'm going to attempt a new Xkbd layout that will hopefully rock.



This is my first .png image for one of the keys.

I took it to an online converter to change it to .xpm since this is the format Xkbd requires.

I put the c.xpm graphic in /usr/share/xkbd/img but I'm getting this error.
xkbd: failed loading image '/usr/share/xkbd/img/c.xpm

I figured it was perhaps a permission problem.

Right now the graphic is set with user/users.

As long as it has read permissions for everyone that won't be a problem
Check the file, may be it wasn't correctly converted.
xpm is an ascii format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_PixMap

So Xkbd only supports .xmp images which will mean no shiny graphics?

Shiny? You have an animated GIF that twinkles or something?

XPM can handle more color than GIF and use a transparent layer. Only problem is lack of compression.

Most graphics apps (gimp, xv, imagemagick, ...) on Linux can convert images to XPM, unless you're using Windows on your desktop.
Looks like imagemagick is available on Maemo.

Okay. My mistake. Sorry.

What I was doing is convertering the image on this site using Tear from my tablet.
http://www.convertmyimage.com/index.php

For some reason, Tear wasn't handling this web page correctly and I got a little confused to this new image format that I never heard of before.

Anyway, I tried this page on my Windows machine and it works perfectly!

Happy!

Many thanks!

Okay. So here is my first, very preliminary working version of Xkbd souped up with graphics this time around.

I'll be using this for Tiny Fugue when it's finally done. I love MUDDing on my tablet.



First off, any feedback to it?

I don't care much for the overall layout on the keys but at least it's a start.

Anyway, would any care to hear me out on getting Xkbd updated?

Most of what needs to be done is commenting out some bad coding.

The only real problem is the final keyboard will probably be about 5+ megs just for the images alone.

I'm sure symlinking this to the external memory would be the best solution.

So yeah, would someone like to take this project on?

What's needed is an extra delay before a key repeats. This is just changing one value in the source code.

Removing the swipe up coding, a horrible feature that was supposed to make it easy on making a capital letter.

Removing the 2 or 4 keysym not found error message it always produces by default.

And the biggest would be allowing a button to change graphics when pressed instead of highlighting it with a custom color around the edges.

I'll be keeping my fingers crossed on this request.

Nice keyboard.

5meg? Try reducing the color count in your images, reduced color images could only require 200-300k total. XPM uses characters to represent each color, when you have a lot of colors it has to use multiple characters per color. Less than 64 colors should be good enough to force single character colors.

Good thing you're only crossing your fingers and not holding your breath.

I didn't think you would be a taker on this so don't feel bad.

Well nuts. This turned out to be a complete bust.

It seems that if you define a customed graphic for a button, it remains static.



So no graphically changing the display with the Shift key, nor with the Modifier one either.

Xkbd would need a seriously face lift in order to load images on all three layers of the keyboard.

Anyway, the source code can be found here:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=62748&postcount=1

I'm guessing though that it will probably now take at least 10 hours of someone tweaking the code to get this app finally up to date.

It's not looking too good for me, is it? *lol*

Are any of you subscribing to Stanford's AI online course?