Annoying handling of text input for character sets other than English

[rawles]

When entering text in, for example, Hebrew, the keyboard events received correspond to characters positions for the Hebrew alphabet, but aren't correctly implemented in the editor. For example, on my keyboard, pressing the button marked A in Hebrew input mode yields the letter shin (ש). The code from onkeydown is 65, for the key, and the code from onkeypress is 1513, the Unicode codepoint for the letter shin.

Users constructing Hebrew pages will be unable to do so unless they use a Latin script input method, for which the keys don't even correspond to any key mapping in common use. The same problem exists for Cyrillic and, to a lesser extent, for other languages using the Latin script like Swedish and German.

The code should be adapted to interpret these keyboard events correctly when in the Hebrew character set, Cyrillic character set or others.

[rawles]

Hebrew is written from right to left, and would need some changes to the cursor behaviour too.

[rawles]

I've made progress on this for English (character set 0) and German (character set 1).

For English, the characters £ (pound sign) and # (hash) work as expected now. For the long dash, you need to enter _ (underscore). There are eight other symbols which aren't on a British keyboard: ←, ↑, →, ‖, ÷, ¼, ½ and ¾. These are all accessible using other keystrokes, since they generate a code at the required character set in each case. The keystrokes are [, ^, ], |, ~, {, \, and } respectively.

For German, the characters Ä, ä, Ö, ö, Ü, ü, ß, § and ° should work as expected.

The remaining character sets are a work in progress, so I'll keep this issue open.

[rawles]

I made a bit more progress on Hebrew (character set 6) and right-to-left input. Things seem to work, but if the user wants to enter an escape code, they must press a meta-key to get to Latin characters, which can often set off application shortcuts.

[rawles]

I will also do some user testing with a friend who speaks Hebrew natively.

[rawles]

Now we have the dead key input method for Swedish, I should add it for German (as well as the other languages).