ktouch: generating lessons

[Sebastian Gottfried]

Hi Michal,

> I would like to add a second czech course to ktouch (the qwerty 
> layout). My
> first hack was to copy the cz layout data file and `t/y/z/`. That 
> mostly did
> the trick, but then I realized the words in later lessons are actual 
> words,
> not just random character permutations. So it would be nice to auto 
> generate
> the course definition so it feels more natural.
Hi Michal,

> I was searching for some autogenerating script in code repository, but 
> could
> not found one (googling has not yield anything relevant either). Could 
> someone
> please tell me how the existing files were auto generated?

The auto-generated courses in KTouch are all very old and predate the 
current course file format. The scripts used to generate these files 
habe been removed because they generate a with (a) poor quality and (b) 
the old course file format. You can still find them in the KDE 3.x 
branches, though. [0]

Personally I don't believe in auto-generated lessons. Creating hand-made 
lessons is laborious, but the results are worth it. Just have look at 
the German course 'de1.xml' [1] for example. It lets you train on real 
words as soon as the second lesson. It introduces new keys in an order 
to make characters important in German available early on. The first 
real sentences appear in lesson four. Training on such data is much more 
fun than training on random gibberish or just a sea of characters. It is 
also closer to actual typing be making the training more effective.

That's why I never bothered to create new auto-generation scripts.  I 
would recommend recommend to use the course editor in KTouch to create a 
new a course. I would also be more than happy to include your results in 
KTouch if you choose to contribute your work.

Best regards,
Sebastian

[0]: https://github.com/KDE/ktouch/tree/KDE/3.0/extras/training-gen
[1]: https://github.com/KDE/ktouch/blob/master/data/courses/de1.xml