Waiting for approval
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We’re using GNOME’s way of naming input methods (the settings application lets people select layouts), so we’ll be following that unless it proves insufficient.
But I appreciate the links, they may come in handy in some unexpected moment.
Getting back to topic: do we have anyone working on for instance Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic or Russian inputs? The last one is probably easiest layout wise but still needs a native to work on it.
I created a Russian layout a few weeks back and submitted a merge request but it is outdated now due to breaking changes in the keyboard layout format. I’ve been meaning to resubmit this but I’ve had trouble getting Gnome Boxes to run the qemu image since I updated to Ubuntu 18.04. I hope to be able to get back to this soon.
Good to hear! I’ll mark that as “in the works”.
When you select the Swedish keyboard in the Region & Language panel in Settings, the se input source is enabled, so the keyboard needs to use that instead of sv. I don’t know why it uses se instead of sv - it’s just easier to go with it.
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If someone gets input for Chinese to work like rinokeros asked that would be great because that would have direct parallels to getting a Japanese input to work that way as well (I believe currently it’s just a kind of base kana flick style method?) which is how it works in Linux (Anthy) and Windows.
Right now, the Japanese layout is Kana only with different layers for Hiragana / Katakana and additional layers for numbers and Latin letters. It’s not even flick style, as this is not supported (yet).
For the different missing components/discussions around this topic, take a look at the following issues: #7, #84, #99, #122. The last one is the issue created by rinokeros, but I don’t think there has been made a lot of progress yet.
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I think it’s because there is a mixup of country codes and language codes (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes compared to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2). With Swedish and Sweden it’s a small difference (to me - not sure if swedes care) but may cause trouble with some other combos, as country code sv= El Salvador, Estonia is ee or et as are Ewe and Ethiopia etc. Problem being that countries and languages are not the same - a common headache with localization (also why two part codes1, 2 may be needed for variants).
It is not uncommon that sv-se is used for Swedish in Sweden and sv-fi for Swedish in Finland (Finland being a country with Swedish as one official language). This combination is necessary for example if a company has different goods in different countries but use Swedish in both.
For a keyboard layout only the language code is necessary and it would be sv according to 639-1.
And there are the Saami in Sweden as well. And Sweden being only one example - Spanish, French, Portugese and several languages without a country.
Just change everything to Esperento or Latin on the phone 
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Why? We’re all speaking here english, not esperanto, not latin. Better to use de-facto universal language rather than what calls itself ‘universal language’.
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I prefer galactic standard to Esperanto 
I like the idea of 2char language - 2char country across the board personally.
I’ve always found it odd that en is USA English then en-uk is British English. Also having the country code at the end may make sense for financial symbols in some scenarios?
That’s the problem: we are the anomaly, exception, minority. English is not the most spoken on the globe. And even if it’s considered one of the most usable, we have to use other languages for interactions with others. Only a fraction of the globe can use English and for many it gets political fast to be forced to use non-mother tongue - even if they could learn it. An there are hundreds more languages used than there are countries (there are actually thousands of languages and variations and regional dialects) as well as several countries that use same/similar language. Esperanto and latin - used as a joke here - would at least be neutral (mostly) and force everyone to learn something new.
But this was more about there maybe being a mistake in selecting list of codes (country/language) which puzzled me and @david.boddie. I say maybe, because it may have been intentionally selected for some unknown reason or implemented wrong only in this instance or implemented only temporary for this (but if not noticed on some levelnow, it may cause problems later for localization efforts and user experience for the reasons mentioned earlier).
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And even lesser fraction speaks Esperanto or any other artificial language. English is now mandatory in the schools as de-facto international language so it will be improving anyway.
Yes, sorry for developing on sarcastic offtop note
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Bad English (like mine) is probably the most used language :-).
Concerning the layout of the keyboard the real problem is however how to place the special characters and the less used characters. This can vary from language to language and also be a question of personal preferences. Personally I am quite pleased with the normal Swedish/Finnish/ keyboard but would like to have easy access to Danish and Norwegian but also German, Icelandic, French, Spanish and Czech characters - even Turkish. Occasionally I need Cyrillic (Russian) keyboard too. So the switching to special (from the Bad English point of view) characters should be smooth.
the community effort means a lot to a lot of people no need to debate that around what language is used the most. any contribution is welcome …
btw even if some languages are considered “dead” like pure-latin or the roman spoken latin they are still VERY usefull to know if you are doing any kind of scientific studies on old documents. besides it makes for great passwords
I briefly looked for information on the languages codes that are used with keyboard layouts in GNOME Control Center and the related settings. I didn’t find anything authoritative.
However, I found this question about language codes which might describe the situation we are in.
I am the one who added the Swedish keyboard - Sorry for screwing up the language code, I went with the ISO-639-1 code, which one shouldn’t. It’s fixed in the repo now however.
Thanks for the layout - useful to others to re-purpose. And 639-1 (sv=swedish) is what you should use (in it se=sami language). It seems to me, the code lead to taking a look at bigger systemic issues (sv… but what about sv-se = swedish sami or sv-se-dvo = swedish sami dvorak [or some other variant] layout etc. for every other language too), just to make sure everything works later on when more languages and tech get added. Although, it might be that the situation requires continuing with short form for now.