====== Russian Keyboard Emulation ====== Since my wife is Russian I am writing in Cyrillic from time to time. However, not often enough to learn the Russian keyboard layout. There are several options available under X (Linux) which did not really satisfy me. The one that come closest is a phonetic version of the RU keyboard (variant: phonetic). There is also one from the US keyboard called rus. Both not brilliant in my eyes. The point is that I got already a bit used to a Latin-Cyrillic transliteration that is used by the Russians if they have to use Latin characters, e.g. with texting (SMS). You can find it at www.translit.ru. Looks like a challenge to go for. ===== Technical Details ===== To write a keyboard layout for xkb, the X-keyboard tool is normally very easy, but now comes the problem: consider the following key assignments: j -> й jo -> ё ja -> я And there are plenty of such things. That means I need j to be a dead key. However we want to use j also as a normal key. My workaround is to define a lot of compose rules, which are normally used to create characters with ascents (e.g. german keyboard layout) This means for any combination of j with another key X being not "o" and "a" one has to create "йY" where Y is the corresponding character for key X. Since one needs a rule for each other key on the keyboard for all the dead keys this asks for a generating script. The perl-script can be downloaded {{:computing:translitcompose.pl|here}}. ===== Installation ===== The installation is pretty easy. You download the {{:computing:us|us}} file and store it under /use/share/X11/xkb/symbols. (You need superuser permissions for that.) Then you also need to Compose rule which are in {{:computing:xcompose.gz|this zip archiv}}. Unpack it and move to ~/.XCompose. Then you have to select the us keyboard with variant "translit" and you are done. I use KDE keyboard tool for it which works great. You can also set an alternative switching key for the keyboard layouts in your shortcut manager. In KDE this is in ''System Settings->Keyboard and Mouse''. Please note that you have to restart you X-applications in order to activate the compose rules. ===== Usage ===== It really works like on www.translit.ru with a few little differences. First of all you can force a dead key to show by either pressing ''q''. The key ''q'' is not used otherwise. You need this if multiple deadkeys follow eachother, e.g. in two c in Россия (meaning Russia). Here is the translation table. ^a^b^v^g^d^e^jo^zh^z^i^j^k^l^m^n^o^p^r^s^t^u^f^h,x^c^ch^sh^w^#^y^'^je^ju^ja^ |а|б|в|г|д|е|ё |ж |х|и|й|к|л|м|н|о|п|р|с|т|у|ф|х |ц|ч |ш |щ|ъ|ы|ь|э|ю|я| здорово! {{tag>computing perl}}