Matchbox-keyboard - Now optimized for Kindle PW

[Aeris]

It took me some hours but I finally managed to change all the layout and buttons of the matchbox-keyboard, the virtual keyboard used in kterm, to fit perfectly on Kindle PW (and maybe touch?). Now the buttons are bigger and the character bold and readable, at the cost of take off all F1, F2 etc. keys.
It could be now integrated in many old and new KUAL apps (better if not virtual terminals).

You can try the keyboard by copying it on kterm folder, overwriting the old files.

UPDATE 1: improved fonts using Baf's script
UPDATE 2: further improvements to layout

[twobob]

I'll bite. great work.
Will look to resuse.

Thanks Aeris.

[baf]

Originally Posted by Aeris

Also, colors of background and borders could be changed but I'm not able to.

I used this simple script to generate images for keyboard. You need convert from ImageMagic. You may change background color and add more graphic elements. Convert is quite powerful tool.
The script will output images to kterm-keys directory in current folder.
Keys.txt files contains all keys data.
Some keys, as return, shift etc, I made separately in a graphic program.
You will need UTF-8 capable terminal and some font installed (I used Helvetica).

BTW. You are comparing your layout to old kterm layout. The latest one, made by nasser, has bigger images.

#!/bin/bash
height="30"
while read name char width
do
size="$width""x$height"
convert -size $size  xc:transparent -pointsize 22 -fill black -gravity Center -draw "text 0,0 '$char'" -font Helvetica -background white ./kterm-keys/$name.png
done < keys.txt

[Aeris]

LoL man I tought to be using the last version of kterm xD And wasted about 6 hours to convert each characters one by one ahah

I'll try your script! However, by now, on kterm 0.7 the default keyboard shows chars that are a bit blurry on PW!

[baf]

Originally Posted by Aeris

However, by now, on kterm 0.7 the default keyboard shows chars that are a bit blurry on PW!

I don't have PW, so I did not test it. Images were enlarged by cubemike99 AFAIR. They should be recreated with the script rather than enlarged if they look bad.

There were already so many different versions of the keyboard that I am getting lost

[Aeris]

The script is great!

[Aeris]

Mmh just a problem.. convert argument "-font" doesn't change anything on my system o.O I'm on linux, and try to specify the font name with every possible notation (even path one), but nothing, always the same

I've also listed them with convert -list font command, and selected from here, but nothing changes...


UPDATE: solved. I had to bring the -font argument just after "convert". Don't ask me why xD

[twobob]

baf "d man"

[Aeris]

Keyboard layout further improved to resemble more an international keyboard, and to gather all the most important keys in the first two modes (normal and shifted).

I'm trying my best to make a good layout for next ported apps, so testers are welcome!
For example I still don't know how does it look on kindle touch...

(Screenshots updated too)

[Basem Alm-Eldin]

Thanks for the good job but why doesn't the command Ctrl+u work?, it's supposed to Clear the line before the cursor position.

[Aeris]

Yes, but pay attention: you must press ctrl+u in order to do that, not ctrl+U.
So, after pressing shift for example, and then ctrl, you must go back to lowercase letters before pressing u

Summarizing, you must press: shift - ctrl - shift , then u

Other commands, like Ctrl+d for example, may work in both forms (uppercase and lowercase).

Thank you for pointing this out!!

[Basem Alm-Eldin]

Tricky but it works, thanks

[Aeris]

Yes, I know it's a bit tricky for some combinations...

I could put 'ctrl' in place of 'caps lock', but I'm trying to make a general purpose keyboard, so I think that caps is used more often

Maybe in the future I'll make a kterm optimized layout too; meanwhile, you can try to edit the xml to fit your needs too, switching some buttons! It's pretty intuitive

[twobob]

Any chance of making this useful in landscape?

I'm trying to implement it but "portrait only" is sadly limiting

[Aeris]

Originally Posted by twobob

Any chance of making this useful in landscape?

I'm trying to implement it but "portrait only" is sadly limiting

Didn't you already accomplish that here ?