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

[Raju Bitter]

Looks like the Webtop text input fields already have a fix for the @  
sign and German ALT-GR key. But the special chars öäüߧ can't be  
entered unless you press CTRL at the same time.

I added Sarah Allen's comments in the Mozilla bug database to the JIRA  
ticket:
http://www.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/LPP-6928
> ------- Comment #58 From Sarah Allen 2009-01-05 11:03:25 PST -------
>
> Note: this bug has been confirmed fix at Laszlo for our use case:  
> entering
> german '@' sign with wmode='opaque' (which had the same behavior as
> transparent)
>
> Took a little while to be sure. We have a feature that is enabled  
> when the
> user agent contains "Firefox" which had to be hacked to make it work  
> with
> Minefield that does not contain "Firefox" in the user agent string.  
> Is that on
> purpose?

Since this is a combined problem of Firefox (doesn't WM_CHAR events in  
windowless mode to the Flash Player) and Flash Player, it should be  
fixed with the next release of Flash Player after Firefox 3.1.

I'll test with Firefox 3.1, but this has been a major problem for  
companies like GMX and their Flex based webmail solution in Germany  
(several million customers in Germany) as well as for G.ho.st.

- Raju

On Feb 20, 2009, at 2:46 PM, Raju Bitter wrote:

> 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
>
>