This is my trial to adapt the Kobo reader for Indian languages that use the Devanagari script. There are several issues of which I deal here only with the keyboard.
Step one: Since we need a lot of characters, we set the local language of the OS to Russian so that we can make use also of the Cyrillic keyboard in addition to the English keyboard. A disadvantage of this is that informations that are provided directly by the OS are displayed in Russian. But these cases are not too many.
Step two: We have to assign Devanagari letters to the keys. This involves overwriting parts of the binary file libnickel.so.1.0.0. There are several tools to do this. I used the patcher of "Modifications for bad eyes".
One of the problems is that some characters/parts of characters are not shown on the keyboard, namely non-initial vowels, anusvara, anunasika, and virama. My solution for this is to assign these signs to positions on the keyboard that can easily be remembered. I assigned the virama to the key under the key of the initial "a", the non-initial vowels under the keys of the corresponding initial vowels (that means non-initial "long a" under initial "long a" and so on). I assigned the anunasika to the key left of "ma", the visarga to the key left of "ha", the virama to the key under initial "a", and also to the key left of "va".
I did this for the keyboard layout used by Kobo Touch and so on. For other devices this will need adaptations, or might not work at all.
On the extended keyboard there ares still some positions available for the Hindi specific characters, which I did not deal with.
Step one: Since we need a lot of characters, we set the local language of the OS to Russian so that we can make use also of the Cyrillic keyboard in addition to the English keyboard. A disadvantage of this is that informations that are provided directly by the OS are displayed in Russian. But these cases are not too many.
Step two: We have to assign Devanagari letters to the keys. This involves overwriting parts of the binary file libnickel.so.1.0.0. There are several tools to do this. I used the patcher of "Modifications for bad eyes".
One of the problems is that some characters/parts of characters are not shown on the keyboard, namely non-initial vowels, anusvara, anunasika, and virama. My solution for this is to assign these signs to positions on the keyboard that can easily be remembered. I assigned the virama to the key under the key of the initial "a", the non-initial vowels under the keys of the corresponding initial vowels (that means non-initial "long a" under initial "long a" and so on). I assigned the anunasika to the key left of "ma", the visarga to the key left of "ha", the virama to the key under initial "a", and also to the key left of "va".
I did this for the keyboard layout used by Kobo Touch and so on. For other devices this will need adaptations, or might not work at all.
On the extended keyboard there ares still some positions available for the Hindi specific characters, which I did not deal with.