On-Screen keyboard and numeric keypad

[Dennieku]

Hi,

I have to develop an on-screen keyboard and on-screen numeric keypad for a
touchscreen UI. The hardest thing with this is that it has to be
multi-lingual.
Has anybody have ideas how to handle the strange characters of some
languages and how to handle the different number of characters in the
alphabet of some languages?

I've already started with the numeric keypad and I've changed the culture to
"th-TH" for testing purposes. I noticed that the
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.NumberFormat.NativeDigits string array
contains all the numeric characters in the specific language, so I could use
this to convert the numeric values on my numeric keypad to the characters in
the correct language. Does anybody know a more simple way to achieve this...
maybe by using formatting of doubles/ints to strings???

Thx for your answers,
Dennieku

 

[Mythran]

Hi,

I have to develop an on-screen keyboard and on-screen numeric keypad for a
touchscreen UI. The hardest thing with this is that it has to be
multi-lingual.
Has anybody have ideas how to handle the strange characters of some
languages and how to handle the different number of characters in the
alphabet of some languages?

I've already started with the numeric keypad and I've changed the culture
to "th-TH" for testing purposes. I noticed that the
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.NumberFormat.NativeDigits string
array contains all the numeric characters in the specific language, so I
could use this to convert the numeric values on my numeric keypad to the
characters in the correct language. Does anybody know a more simple way to
achieve this... maybe by using formatting of doubles/ints to strings???

Thx for your answers,
Dennieku

What I would do (although I have never done anything similar to what you are
doing...multi-lingual), would be to create separate displays for each
language, and show them depending on the current os language (or language
selection). Since you have to handle each language separately anyways, this
gives you full control over each look and feel. You could design it so that
all logic is stored in a single "set" of classes while the language
dependant UI stuff is stored in a separate set of classes...this way, you
can make changes to the logic in only one place and it effects all
languages..

HTH,
Mythran

 

[rowe_newsgroups]

What I would do (although I have never done anything similar to what you are
doing...multi-lingual), would be to create separate displays for each
language, and show them depending on the current os language (or language
selection). Since you have to handle each language separately anyways, this
gives you full control over each look and feel. You could design it so that
all logic is stored in a single "set" of classes while the language
dependant UI stuff is stored in a separate set of classes...this way, you
can make changes to the logic in only one place and it effects all
languages..

HTH,
Mythran

Or you could use UserControls for each keyboard and have them
implement a common Interface (or abstract class).

Thanks,

Seth Rowe

 

[David Ching]

Hi,

I have to develop an on-screen keyboard and on-screen numeric keypad for a
touchscreen UI. The hardest thing with this is that it has to be
multi-lingual.
Has anybody have ideas how to handle the strange characters of some
languages and how to handle the different number of characters in the
alphabet of some languages?

Maybe you could see how Microsoft implemented their on screen keyboard in
Vista. I imagine it has to deal with the same issues. You access it by
Start | All Programs | Accessories | Ease of access | On screen keyboard.

-- David

 

[Michael S. Kaplan [MSFT]]

You might also find the following series helpful -- it covers how to
interrogate a built-in layout for all of the key assignments within it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/04/22/581107.aspx


--
MichKa [Microsoft]
NLS Collation/Locale/Keyboard Technical Lead
Globalization Infrastructure, Fonts, and Tools
Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap

This posting is provided "AS IS" with
no warranties, and confers no rights.