Tag: language

Looking into the symbol files

In the previous post, we talked about the ANTLR grammar that parses the XKB layout files. The grammar is available at http://code.google.com/p/keyboardlayouteditor/source/browse. I’ll rather push to the freedesktop repository once the project is completed. Now it’s too easy for me, just doing svn commit -m something. Below you can see the relevant layout files for …

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Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/looking-into-the-symbol-files/

Parsing XKB files with antlr

antlr (well, antlr3) is an amazing tool that replaces lex/flex, yacc/bison. One would use antlr3 if they want to deal with Domain-Specific Languages (DSL), an example of which are the text configuration files. In our case, we use antlr3 to parse some of the XKB configuration files, those found in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/??. Our aim is to …

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Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/parsing-xkb-files-with-antlr/

Take Back The Tech #2!

Last year we talked about the Take Back The Tech, an initiative by the Association for Progressive Communications, Women’s Networking Support Programme (APC WNSP) to stop violence against women with the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), that took place between the 25th November and the 10th December. The same initiative runs this year …

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Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/take-back-the-tech-2/

Localisation issues in home directory folders (xdg-user-dirs)

In new distributions such as Ubuntu 7.10 there is now support for folder names of personal data in your local language. What this means is that ~/Desktop can now be called ~/Επιφάνεια εργασίας. You also get a few more default folders, including ~/Music, ~/Documents, ~/Pictures and so on. This functionality of localised home folders has …

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Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/localisation-issues-in-home-directory-folders-xdg-user-dirs/

Cannot write Greek Polytonic in Linux

For up to date instructions for Greek and Greek Polytonic see How to type Greek, Greek Polytonic in Linux. The following text is kept for historical purposes. Greek and Greek Polytonic now works in Linux, using the default Greek layout. General Update: If you have Ubuntu 8.10, Fedora 10 or a similarly new distribution, then …

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Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/cannot-write-greek-polytonic-in-linux/

Important MO file optimisation for en_* locales, and partly others

During GUADEC, Tomas Frydrych gave a talk on exmap-console, a cut-down version of exmap that can work well on mobile devices. During the presentation, Tomas showed how to use the tool to find the culprits in memory (ab)use on the GNOME desktop. One issue that came up was that the MO files taking up space …

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Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/important-mo-file-optimisation-for-en_-locales-and-partly-others/