[Laszlo-dev] Linux Flash Player - input of foreign languages (special chars) in OL and Webtop

[Raju Bitter]

Hi all,

as you probably know there have always been problems with Flash on  
Linux, despite the stronger support of Adobe for the Linux Flash  
Player since late 2006. It's not as bad for the US, but for a list of  
countries using character codes which are higher then ASCII 0-127  
there's still the problem with input of special chars in foreign  
languages. The languages/countries affected are (at least the ones I  
know about):

se (Swedish)
de (Germany and Austria)
no (Norway)
dk (Denmark)
is (Icelandic)
es (Spanish)
fr (French)
nl (Belgium)
gb (QUK)

I did a test run with several versions of Flash Player this week, and  
the last Flash Player which supports input with special chars in Linux/ 
Firefox is FP 9.048. Since then all the new versions require that you  
press control (CTRL) on your keyboard to get the correct keyboard  
value. There are several bug reports in the Flash Player bug database:

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-40
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1160
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-659

The bug has been reported for OL as well:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/LPP-6928

In our deployment of Webtop we control the hardware, OS and FF/ 
FlashPlayer version, but when we tried with Flash PLayer 9.048, the  
Calendar app in Webtop has problem communicating with the backend,  
probably a Flash Player bug.

senshi suggested that the workaround which captures the input  and  
transforms the byte values, but that will only work for SWF9:
http://forum.openlaszlo.org/showthread.php?p=42362#post42362

Has anyone tried to come up with a workaround for this problem? Is it  
technically possible to capture the raw keyboard input and transform  
the values on-the-fly for SWF8?

Thanks,
Raju