Localisation

Thursday, 17th November 2005

Typing

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One reason you'd want to connect a keyboard to your TI - or indeed any device - would be to type on it. After all, it offers a nice comfortable layout to type quickly on...

One easy way to deal with the keyboard as a typing device would be to write a function that converts the scancode into an ASCII code (or a special code in the 128→255 range for keys without sensible ASCII equivalents, such as the Windows or cursor keys). But here's the problem - not all keyboards have the same characters printed on the keys. A UK layout will be QWERTY, a French layout will be AZERTY and a German layout will be QWERTZ. A US keyboard will have @ over the 2, whereas my keyboard has " over the 2.

The way I get decided to get around this was a fairly inelegant (but simple) one - assume the calculator has a keyboard localisation file on it. A function call I have provided called keyi_load_table will attempt to find and load the keyboard layout definition file you can create (returning an error code if it can't find any). Any software that uses these routines can therefore instantly tailor themselves to match the keyboard layout of the individual user. The files themselves aren't very big - it contains two mappings for the entire keyboard (normal and shifted), a table of which keys Caps Lock affects (26 bytes - A→Z on an English keyboard) and a final table for alternate codes for when Num Lock is pressed.

With this all put together, a single call to keyi_translate will convert a scancode in the accumulator to the ASCII/special code, automatically adjusting for Shift/Caps Lock/Num Lock. You can even call the function keyi_check_printable to see if the code is in the printable character range, or keyi_get_status_icon to get a character code for a suitable cursor - no special status returns  , shift returns , caps lock returns A and caps lock+shift returns a.

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