Re: How to recognize keyboard insertion?

[David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> OK, but knowing whether to mirror or not requires information about
> whether a given keyboard already mirrors characters.  Can this be
> found somewhere, or queried at run time?

[Only if you want to do it automatically, if it was a user preference 
the user would just be setting ltr and rtl current input methods as 
desired? Or maybe it would be more intuitive to use just one input 
method, e.g. hebrew-parenjuggle, expanding the input method layer to 
support rtl/ltr context sensitive definitions for individual rules]

It is possible to find out if the current os keyboard layout is us or 
hebrew or whatever which could be coupled with prior information that it 
is standard for certain layouts to mirror.  I don't know exhaustively 
which ones do, though a lot could probably be extracted by inspection of 
the xkb database.

If OTOH you wanted to find out whether the code a keypress returns under 
the current os layout actually corresponds to the glyph printed on the 
keyboard, you can't really - Only the user knows that at present as 
current keyboards don't really inform the computer what glyphs they have 
physically printed on them AFAIK (though it would certainly be 
technically feasible for a keyboard to e.g. say "Hi, I am physically a 
standard british qwerty 105 key keyboard" to a computer with some 
well-defined wire protocol, I don't think typical PC ones do).