/kbddisplay

Draws a picture of an XKB keyboard layout. Doesn't work yet.

Summary

Draws a picture of an XKB keyboard layout.

This program takes a description of an XKB keyboard layout, and outputs a pretty XML keyboard, styled so that it can be viewed in a web browser. The output XML could possibly be used by other programs.

Written because xkbprint sucks. In particular, xkbprint

  • displays its internal character name (e.g. Cyrillic_softsign, rightdoublequotemark, U0462) rather than the actual character (e.g. ь, ”, Ѣ)
  • ’s output is sometimes upside-down
  • outputs in black and white and uses an ugly font
  • can only display 2 shift states (!)
  • etc.

To configure it, edit the CSS file.

To do @@@@@

  • Write the actual program that generates the XML.
  • Replace the CSS with XSL, for more flexibility?
  • Display the Unicode code number in small font underneath the caption (rather than only in the tooltip) so you can see it if you print it out

Caveats

  • Currently it doesn’t actually work, since browsers don’t implement CSS 3’s attr() function.