Yorick Phlypo wrote:
Hi list,
I'm working on an installation with a keyboard as an input for words, that on their turn are sent to a projection. I started with the [gemkeyname] object to avoid keycombinations like ctrl+Q. (As for the keyboard is completely in the hands of unknown users.) But in this case there are a lot of limitations considering the textoutput, like the unpossibility (?) of getting undercase letters. Since I'm especially interested in the manipulation of the text within the Gemwindow, which
i don't know which Gem you are using, but here (linux) [gemkeyname] works fine with uppercase, lowercase and special characters (e.g. Ctrl-x): each gets a separate identifier, according to its name.
as far as my testing went, [gemkeyname] worked fine on linux and w23 (though the naming of special keys like "Left" might be differing across platform (but this might as well be fixed already)), and though i have not done any testing on os-x, i believe that a lot of other people have...
it would be interesting to know what system you are on (and whether it allows you to use upper/lowercase characters anyhow - afair the zx80 does not have lowercase characters; please tell us that you managed to run pd/Gem on it)
if this is really a bug, please file a bug-report at http://sf.net/projects/pd-gem
works quite nice up to now, I'd like to work without these limitations, so working with [keyname] and [key] seems to be a logical solution. Except for the keycombinations like ctrl+Q again. At this point I have no idea how to work around this.
i have once posted a patch to add a "kiosk" mode to pd which disables all the menus and keyboard-shortcuts in pd. you should still be able to find it in the sourceforge patch-tracker (of pd that is: http://sf.net/projects/pure-data) (it won't get accepted into main pd though, as there are other better as in: more granular) ways to acchieve this)
otoh, if you are doing an installation with Gem you will most likely want to run it in fullscreen mode, so that people do not see the underlying pd and OS. in this case [keyname]/[key] won't help you, since they only work when they have the keyboard focus (which they don't when the gemwindow is before them).
a good way to get the keyboard regardless of the the window-focus is [hid] (and probably [hidin])
oh, and don't forget to remove the Control, Alt, Meta keys from your keybaord, as people will likely keep rebooting your machine....
mfga.sdr IOhannes