Spanish special characters not working [& Portuguese]

[sschvarstein]

Before talking about issues let me congratulate and thank you for your great app.
My trouble is with Spanish special characters, like á, é, etc. When I use the iPad keyboard to write a remote text on my computer this characters are not wriiten, even I press the right keys. That's all.

[raf]

Remoter keyboard support is expandable. If you'd like to help let me know and I'll point you in the right direction. If you help me get the keyboard layout file done for Spanish, I'll include it in the next version.

Let me know if you're interested, and I'll post the instructions here.

Thanks!,

Raf.

[vyisf]

Hello,
I've read the previous messages, and I'm interested in helping including a portuguese (brazilian) keyboard. How can I contribute?

[raf]

Hello,
I've read the previous messages, and I'm interested in helping including a portuguese (brazilian) keyboard. How can I contribute?

Great!, thanks vyisf.

What you will need to do is connect your iDevice to your computer, go into iTunes and into your iDevice. Then click on the Apps tab to access the file sharing section, which is all the way at the bottom of the Apps page.
Once on the file sharing section, select Remoter to reveal the shared files.

Keyboard "Layouts" have an .rkl extension (Remoter Keyboard Layout). You will have to make one of these files for Portuguese.

Copy one of the included files (like the one for German for example), rename it appropriately and modify it to match the way special characters are generated for the Portuguese keyboard.

Let me know if you need more help to explain how entries in the .rkl file work.

Thanks!!,

Raf.

[vyisf]

Hello, again. I've copied the ".rkl" file, but I really didn't figure out how the entries are coded. I was following the keyboard as a matrix, and the "KD" / "KU" stuff as the indicators to up or lower case, but it made no sense - at least not to my portuguese keyboard.
If you could just give me an example, like how would be the entry for a "ç" or "á", I'd follow your lead.
Thanks,

[raf]

OK, this is how the rkl file works.

Each entry (line) is a mapping from the desired character (the character on the iPhone/iPad keyboard) to a sequence that generates this key for the AppleVNCServer (which to my knowledge is the only server that requires this mapping.

Turns out, no matter what language you're using, the VNCServer expects the sequence as it would be done on an English (US) keyboard. So you need to map where keys are physically on your keyboard versus the English (US) keyboard.

For instance, to generate the 'ö' character in the German keyboard, you press the key to the left of the "L", that maps in the English (US) keyboard to the ';', so the mapping would be: For ö, send KeyDown:; KeyUp:;
or:
ö,KD;KU;

For more complicated things: ';' on the german keyboard is generated via Shift plus the key next to 'M', which on the English (US) keyboard maps to the ',' key. So the mapping for ';' is ShiftDown KeyDown:, KeyUp:, ShiftUp
or:
;,SD-KD,KU,SU-

So, all mappings are done in groups of three characters: (also make sure you balance them, for every KDx, you need an associated KUx, etc)
SD- : Shift Down
SU- : Shift Up
KDx : Key Down x (replace x with the correct key)
KUx : Key Up x (same)
MD- : Meta Down (alt/option in Mac)
MU- : Meta Up (alt/option in Mac)
AU-/AD- : Alt Up/Down (for linux/windows)


That's about it.. I think. Let me know how it goes!

Thanks for helping!,

Raf.

[vyisf]

Ok, now it makes sense... and will take a bit of work. I've tested with just one special character and it worked just fine. I think I will have to map the keys one by one, as the layout of the keyboards defined in the application are very different from the brazilian portuguese one. Wouldn't it be much easier if Apple just used some kind of universal encode, like UTF8 or something like that? Anyway, I didn't say how much I like your application - and believe me: I really do. I used many other apps for VNC connecting between the iPhone and my MacBook Pro, but each one had some kind of trouble. RemoteTap, for instance, was great, but the dedicated server it requires takes a lot of processing power, and, therefore, battery. Using the built in VNC server found on SnowLeopard seemed a much better way to do this - and Remoter is proving I was right. I will try to map all the keys in the next few days - but I'm afraid I will just have time by the weekend. As soon as I get it, I will send you the file for checking.
Thanks again, and keep up the great work.

[raf]

Ok, now it makes sense... and will take a bit of work. I've tested with just one special character and it worked just fine. I think I will have to map the keys one by one, as the layout of the keyboards defined in the application are very different from the brazilian portuguese one. Wouldn't it be much easier if Apple just used some kind of universal encode, like UTF8 or something like that? Anyway, I didn't say how much I like your application - and believe me: I really do. I used many other apps for VNC connecting between the iPhone and my MacBook Pro, but each one had some kind of trouble. RemoteTap, for instance, was great, but the dedicated server it requires takes a lot of processing power, and, therefore, battery. Using the built in VNC server found on SnowLeopard seemed a much better way to do this - and Remoter is proving I was right. I will try to map all the keys in the next few days - but I'm afraid I will just have time by the weekend. As soon as I get it, I will send you the file for checking.
Thanks again, and keep up the great work.

Thanks!, and thank you for helping.
Yes, I agree that Apple should just use UTF8, that's what Linux and most Windows VNC servers use. But glad to hear you are making progress.

Raf.

[Pabro66]

It dose not map The caracters correctly also VineVNC on MacOS X ...

Is anybody working on Italian Keyboard?

Thanks
Paolo

[raf]

Spanish keyboard support will be part of Remoter 1.9 (only required for OS X mainly).

Raf.