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

[Raju Bitter]

I checked with the latest requirements for OL. Officially Linux and  
Firefox 3 are supported. That means we should somehow fix that problem.
http://www.openlaszlo.org/requirements
> OpenLaszlo 4.2 has been fully tested and is supported with these  
> browser/platform combinations:
>
> 	• Linux 2.6 kernel Firefox 3 -- Flash 8, Flash 9, and DHTML

If we can provide a fix within OL for this problem, we'd be ahead of  
Flash and Flex for now.

- Raju

On Feb 20, 2009, at 11:35 AM, Raju Bitter wrote:

> 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