Approval to move kdenonbeta/viki to kdereview

[Shaheed]

Hi all,

I asked Waldo about the process for moving stuff from kdenonbeta to kdereview, 
and he suggested I started with a mail here!

1. What is viki?
=========

"viki" is a Visual Keyboard. It retrieves a description of your configured 
keyboard from X (actually, XKB), and then draws am emulation of it on screen. 
The idea is that this is useful:

- when your (US, UK, german, whatever) keycaps don't match the language of the 
layout you are using (e.g. Bengali). In such cases, viki provides visual 
training for the location of the keys on your keyboard, and also offers the 
ability to use the mouse to generate input visually.

- for accessibility, it offers a mouse/screen driven alternative to the 
keyboard. The drawing scale and font size can be controlled to give, for 
example, a magnified view of the keyboard.

2. What is the status?
=============

It basically works. Known issues:

1. Recently (?), automatic redraw on keyboard layout change seems to have 
stopped working. I assume that this is something to do with my switch to 
Xorg, and not a regression in viki.

2. There are a couple of hacks in the code to work around what appear to be 
XKB bugs. One is that the modifiers don't seem to be correctly reported, and 
the second is a wierd interaction with kxkb (and which has a workaround 
applied to it for that).

3. Cannot draw non-rectangular keyboards (e.g. Microsoft Natural keyboard 
layout).

AFAIK, Suse are shipping this (not sure if that is in the Suse distro, or a 
customer specific thing).

3. What are the plans for it?
=================

It is basically complete. Possible ideas might be:

1. to reuse the drawing logic in kcmkeyboard to draw the selected keyboard 
layout (i.e. visual selection of layout).

2. Integrate into whatever kde-accessibility needs

3. Integrate into KDE's IM technology, e.g. by making complex character 
composition more visual.

I am not sure if it belongs in kdebase or kdeacessibility or what. All 
feedback and suggestions welcome.

Thanks, Shaheed