Would it be possible to add a Hebrew virtual keyboard to the edit and comment boxes so that we can type in hebrew, should the need arise?
Right now I'm either cutting and pasting, or just transliterating what I want to quote.
Would it be possible to add a Hebrew virtual keyboard to the edit and comment boxes so that we can type in hebrew, should the need arise?
Right now I'm either cutting and pasting, or just transliterating what I want to quote.
I'm Laura, a product manager at Stack Exchange.
We've implemented the Hebrew keyboard as an experiment to see if this is a tool we should develop further and offer as an add-on feature for communities like this one that have a valid need to quote or reference texts in in languages that use non-Latin alphabets.
The feature is based on HodofHod's user script. It works for question bodies and answers on the main site, and it's a new button right in the editing menu:
Clicking the icon for the Hebrew keyboard will pop up a box (which you can drag to wherever you'd like it on the screen). The keyboard will automatically disappear when you click outside of the main body area.
The virtual keyboard is not available for comments, question titles, or tag fields; there are a few reasons for that. First, like I said, this is an experiment, so we wanted to cover the most important use cases without fully fleshing out a feature that we haven't decided yet to permanently integrate into our system. If you need to post in Hebrew outside a question or answer body, you can use the body field to type with the virtual keyboard, then copy it to where you actually want to post. The other reason for not adding this support outside of main content areas is a UI reason: it becomes much more difficult to find an obvious but unobtrusive way to call up the keyboard when it's not part of a full formatting menu.
As I mentioned before, this is an experiment. Therefore, if there's something buggy, weird, or missing, feel free to let us know here on Meta Mi Yodeya. If it's a success, we may add this as another tool that we can add to sites where it seems appropriate and useful.
It looks like you're trying to get a feature request implemented. You should totally drop that and try jQuery. ;)
I've thrown together (in jQuery) a really quick keyboard userscript (installation instructions). It will insert a button into the post editor and into chat, that toggles an on-screen Hebrew keyboard. It's draggable, and resizable, and awesome. Really. There are some screenshots below. You should check them out.
Couple things to note:
‏
to unicode, so this setting only applies for non-chat textfields.The keyboard is textfield agnostic. It will insert characters into whatever textfield has, or last had, focus.
Before y'all ask, I think meseg and rafe and maqaf and paseq and sof pasuk is pushing it. You got mapik/dagesh/shuruk, and that oughta keep you busy for a while. (Ok, I'm kidding; if you want it, I'll add it. :D)
In chat, the button is right next to the send button:
Everywhere else, the keyboard button appears in a fixed location on the bottom left of your browser window.
Keyboard looks like this:
And the settings like this:
The one at the top-right-hand corner of the page at http://www.hebrewbooks.org/ has the following good aspects:
However, it has the following bad aspects:
:-)
). (And I suppose most people who are used to them don't need on-screen keyboards, as they'll just use their own keyboards.)