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Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting

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  Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> - 2016-09-24 16:10 +0200
    Re: Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting davidson@freevolt.org - 2016-09-24 17:10 +0200
      Re: Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de> - 2016-09-24 17:30 +0200
      Re: Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2016-09-25 19:00 +0200
        Re: Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting davidson@freevolt.org - 2016-10-04 03:30 +0200
    Re: Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de> - 2016-09-24 17:30 +0200
    Re: Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting ken <gebser@mousecar.com> - 2016-09-26 07:50 +0200
    Re: Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2016-09-26 19:10 +0200

#172732 — Typing Cyrillic script with a UK keyboard in an en-gb setting

My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from this point 
of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and no foreign 
fonts "working", but that is another story.)  

Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what do those of 
you doing this or similar find works comfortably.

Thanks,
Lisi

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#172738

On Sat, 24 Sep 2016, Lisi Reisz wrote:

> My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from this point
> of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and no foreign
> fonts "working", but that is another story.)
>
> Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what do those of
> you doing this or similar find works comfortably.

This is what I use in my /etc/default/keyboard file:

    $ grep '^[^#]' /etc/default/keyboard
    XKBMODEL="pc101"
    XKBLAYOUT="us,ru,sy"
    XKBVARIANT=""
    XKBOPTIONS="grp:caps_toggle,compose:menu"
    BACKSPACE="guess"

The "ru" portion of the XKBLAYOUT value, and the "grp:caps_toggle"
setting in XKBOPTIONS are the relevant parts for your purposes.

It makes capslock a toggle between en_US, russian, and syrian arabic
keyboard layout.

The usual capslock function is still available via Shift+Capslock.

I'll be interested to see other responses.

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#172741

On 09/24/2016 05:07 PM, davidson@freevolt.org wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Sep 2016, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> 
>> My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from this point
>> of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and no foreign
>> fonts "working", but that is another story.)
>>
>> Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what do those of
>> you doing this or similar find works comfortably.
> 
> This is what I use in my /etc/default/keyboard file:
> 
>    $ grep '^[^#]' /etc/default/keyboard
>    XKBMODEL="pc101"
>    XKBLAYOUT="us,ru,sy"
>    XKBVARIANT=""
>    XKBOPTIONS="grp:caps_toggle,compose:menu"
>    BACKSPACE="guess"
> 
> The "ru" portion of the XKBLAYOUT value, and the "grp:caps_toggle"
> setting in XKBOPTIONS are the relevant parts for your purposes.
> 
> It makes capslock a toggle between en_US, russian, and syrian arabic
> keyboard layout.

That's a valid way of doing this (most desktop environments allow you
to define multiple keyboard layouts + a shortcut to switch without you
having to fiddle with Xkb btw.), I personally find it really hard
though to write Cyrillic with a Russian keyboard layout, if the
characters aren't printed on the keyboard. Of course, I grew up with
the Latin layout, and I don't have any real muscle memory for the
Cyrillic layout. (Typing then would be a LOT of trial and error for
me.)

If you indeed grew up on a Russion keyboard, your suggestion of just
switching the layout is probably the easier solution. It's just not
something I'd personally be able to use in any efficient manner.

Regards,
Christian

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#172772

On Sat 24 Sep 2016 at 15:07:10 +0000, davidson@freevolt.org wrote:

> On Sat, 24 Sep 2016, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> 
> >My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from this point
> >of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and no foreign
> >fonts "working", but that is another story.)
> >
> >Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what do those of
> >you doing this or similar find works comfortably.
> 
> This is what I use in my /etc/default/keyboard file:
> 
>    $ grep '^[^#]' /etc/default/keyboard
>    XKBMODEL="pc101"
>    XKBLAYOUT="us,ru,sy"
>    XKBVARIANT=""
>    XKBOPTIONS="grp:caps_toggle,compose:menu"
>    BACKSPACE="guess"
> 
> The "ru" portion of the XKBLAYOUT value, and the "grp:caps_toggle"
> setting in XKBOPTIONS are the relevant parts for your purposes.
> 
> It makes capslock a toggle between en_US, russian, and syrian arabic
> keyboard layout.
> 
> The usual capslock function is still available via Shift+Capslock.
> 
> I'll be interested to see other responses.

Neat! Done as root, of course, because I do not think a user can change
the keymap. The setupcon manual implies a ~/.keyboard can be used but it
does not work for me.

However, a user can set the screen font by specifing a file to use with
VARIANT. This is ~/.console-setup.CYR:

  ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"
  CHARMAP="UTF-8"
  CODESET="CyrSlav"
  FONTFACE="TerminusBold"
  FONTSIZE="14x28"

Load it with 'setupcon -f' CYR.

-- 
Brian.

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#173170

On Sun, 25 Sep 2016, Brian wrote:

> On Sat 24 Sep 2016 at 15:07:10 +0000, davidson@freevolt.org wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 24 Sep 2016, Lisi Reisz wrote:
>>
>>> My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from
>>> this point of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and
>>> no foreign fonts "working", but that is another story.)
>>>
>>> Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what
>>> do those of you doing this or similar find works comfortably.
>>
>> This is what I use in my /etc/default/keyboard file:
>>
>>    $ grep '^[^#]' /etc/default/keyboard
>>    XKBMODEL="pc101"
>>    XKBLAYOUT="us,ru,sy"
>>    XKBVARIANT=""
>>    XKBOPTIONS="grp:caps_toggle,compose:menu"
>>    BACKSPACE="guess"
>>
>> The "ru" portion of the XKBLAYOUT value, and the "grp:caps_toggle"
>> setting in XKBOPTIONS are the relevant parts for your purposes.
>>
>> It makes capslock a toggle between en_US, russian, and syrian
>> arabic keyboard layout.
>>
>> The usual capslock function is still available via Shift+Capslock.
>>
>> I'll be interested to see other responses.
>
> Neat! Done as root, of course, because I do not think a user can
> change the keymap.

Yes. A method that allows an unprivileged user to configure their
keyboard in a given VT would better suit my purposes but, until I find
that method, this is what I'm using.

(Though I have since changed the XKBLAYOUT to just "us,ru" because
that three-way toggling, us -> ru -> us -> sy, was so annoying as to
be practically non-functional, my arabic is crap besides, etc.)

> The setupcon manual implies a ~/.keyboard can be used but it does
> not work for me.

Me neither. I have not managed to get that to work. (For french
language input, specifically, I prefer the "alt-intl" value for
XKBVARIANT, but for most other purposes it is somewhat impractical on
my keyboard model, and I would not wish to impose it on arbitrary
users. I should/might/will probably start a new thread soon about
getting ~/.keyboard customisation to work in virtual terminals.)

> However, a user can set the screen font by specifing a file to use
> with VARIANT. This is ~/.console-setup.CYR:
>
>  ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"
>  CHARMAP="UTF-8"
>  CODESET="CyrSlav"
>  FONTFACE="TerminusBold"
>  FONTSIZE="14x28"
>
> Load it with 'setupcon -f' CYR.

Thank you so much for this. This filled in a couple of missing links
for me, and now I can view cyrillic in the VT of my choice.

(Before this, I could enter, but not view cyrillic in a VT, unless I
made system-wide changes. That is, to view whatever I had typed, I had
to either start up an X display, or as root make the system-wide
change to CyrSlav codeset.)

Also, having speculated that the ACTIVE_CONSOLES value could be a
command substitution, I tried

  ACTIVE_CONSOLES="$(tty)"

in my ~/.console-setup.cyr. It works as expected.

Now issuing "setupcon -f cyr" in a given VT configures CyrSlav codeset
for just that VT. (As default, I prefer Lat15.)

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#172740

On 09/24/2016 04:10 PM, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from this point 
> of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and no foreign 
> fonts "working", but that is another story.)  
> 
> Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what do those of 
> you doing this or similar find works comfortably.

There's ibus and the ibus-table-translit package, so all GUI applications
that support ibus [1] will allow you to enter cyrillic characters via
typing latin equivalents. (ibus is a generic input framework originally
designed for complex scripts, such as Chinese, but now supports a lot of
things, just search for packages with ibus-table- in their name. Btw.
there's also a package for traditional Russian, if you're interested in
really old writings. For any modern Russian I would recommend just using
the aforementioned ibus-table-translit though.)

For example, typing "b" will give you a б, typing "v" will give you a в,
typing "ya" will give you a я, typing "yo" will give you a ё, and so on.

ibus is not completely trivial to setup, but it's not terribly difficult
either. It does take a bit of getting used to, but if you switch the
method back to "English", the keyboard will behave as you'd normally
expect.

Alternatively, there's something similar but as a website, called
http://translit.net/
which does the same in the Browser (Javascript required) - most Russian
people I know use that regularly.

Also, in case this is archived and people find this: for Mac OS X user
there appears to be
https://github.com/archagon/cyrillic-transliterator
which I believe does the same thing that ibus-table-translit does.
(Never tried it though.)

Hope that helps.

Regards,
Christian

[1] See https://wiki.debian.org/I18n/ibus for details. Also, ibus-setup
    is your friend.

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#172786

On 09/24/2016 10:10 AM, Lisi Reisz wrote:
> My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from this point
> of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and no foreign
> fonts "working", but that is another story.)
>
> Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what do those of
> you doing this or similar find works comfortably.
>
> Thanks,
> Lisi
>
This may be of some help: 
http://linuxmanagers.blogspot.com/2016/09/using-multiple-language-keyboards-in.html

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#172818

Lisi Reisz wrote:

> My husband has just asked to do this.  His system is vanilla from this
> point
> of view.  (Mine is in a mess, with a messed-up scim and no foreign
> fonts "working", but that is another story.)
> 
> Advice please on the best way to achieve this for him.  I.e., what do
> those of you doing this or similar find works comfortably.
> 
> Thanks,
> Lisi

Hi, Lizi,
let me share also my experience as I am using bg/ru/en/de on daily basis. I
use TDE (as you may know already). In the keyboard setup I have few options
to select. Most important is "phonetic"
This results in following command
        setxkbdmap -model pc105 -layout bg -variant phonetic
or Russian
        setxkbdmap -model pc105 -layout ru -variant phonetic

Bulgarians/Russians have 1-2 conventional layouts for phonetic where Latin
letters correspond to Cyrillic letter. The ones not present in the Latin
alphabet are located on some other keys. You can search/google for the
layout and write them on the keys with white permanent marker (after
testing). Alternatively there are printed self glueing letters for
keyboards you can order online.
I never learned the "standard" Bulgarian layout as known from the type
writers from the time before computers got in, so I find the phonetic
really easy to use.

I hope this helps

regards

PS: console is a different story, but I think you are not interested in
typing Cyrillic in the console

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