[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Gsoc 2010

[David Bruce]

Hi Loic,

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 6:38 AM, Loic Besse <loicbesse at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm Loïc, and  I come here for the Gsoc 2010. I discover the Open Source
> world and I think your project is very interesting, and I saw recently your
> ideas on the Gsoc's Ideas page.
>
> One of them, the SDL 1.3 adaptation, interest me. I've never worked on a
> project, but I have already used the SDL or Qt. So I would like to
> contribute to Tux4kids project during the Gsoc to make me my first
> experience on a project.

That was something I came up with fairly quickly - I have to admit I
don't have a very clear sense of how extensive this task would be.  I
am pretty sure that the change will be more important for tuxtype than
for tuxmath, as the API for keyboard input is changing in SDL 1.3.  If
you are interested in this, try to find out as much as you can about
the API changes between SDL 1.2.x and 1.3 and see where our code will
have to be changed.

If just "porting" our programs from SDL 1.2 to 1.3 proves to be too
minor a task for a whole summer, there is also the closely related
issue of improving handling of keyboard input in tuxtype.  We
currently rely on hand-written "keyboard.lst" files to specify the
"typable" characters for each language, which is an ugly, error-prone
hack.  With SDL 1.3, we should be able to query the OS for this via
the new virtual keysyms, except for Asian languages that require
multiple keystrokes for each character.  This brings up the adaptation
of the "input methods" code from tuxpaint for use in tuxtype...  But I
think this list has already exceeded what can be done in a summer :-)

David Bruce