Smart Keyboard Forum

I just bought your keyboard as I do a lot of work in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Esperanto.
My first request is for the auto-suggest in Spanish. In Spanish, there are many words that are spelled the same but have different meanings depending on the accents. I prefer to type the word without accents and then choose the correct word from the suggestion list but, in Smart Keyboard Pro, when I type a Spanish word such as 'tu' no option for 'tú' appears in the auto complete list. I have to manually type the accented "ú" which takes more time. Also when I type a word like 'razon' it corrects it to 'razones' because it does not have an accent as opposed to 'razón'. The same goes with words like 'quien'. It seems like 'quién" would be second on the list, but it's fourth.

My second comment about the Spanish keyboard has to do with punctuation. Would it be possible to make the upside down exclamation mark '¡' available with '!' when you hold down 'z'? The same goes with '¿'.

The next thing as to do with adding a new language. Would it be possible to add support for the Esperanto language? I wouldn't need dictionary support (if you don't want to go to all that work) but it would be nice to have the keys. The Esperanto alphabet is laid out as follows:
ŜŬERTĴUIOP
ASDFGĜHJKL
ZĈCVBNM

There would be an alternate key on the H that would be 'Ĥ'. This language needs a special keyboard because these are not standard accents so there is no way to add them using the international keyboard. If you want I would be willing to help produce such a keyboard and I also have a word list that could be used for a possible dictionary.
The rest of the keyboard could be just like the English keyboard.

I'm just BUMPing this to make sure it's not forgotten. I would REALLY love the Esperanto support.
Thanks.

I don't forget, it's in the TODO list (meanwhile you can give me a link to a word list sorted by frequency if you want a dictionary)

Thanks Cyril. I have included a link to a comma-separated list of words in order of frequency. I wrote a program that searched the web and generated this list. I can't personally say that this is the best out there (as I couldn't find any done before).

This list contains 66181 words in its dictionary which should be a fairly good start. Let me know if it works.
The dictionary is here: http://downloads.calebgo.com/EsperantoWordList.txt.

Thank you so much! I love the way this turned out, and I use it every day.

I revived this thread to ask about the feature mentioned by the OP about accented words not being suggested first. His example of razon having razones suggested first instead of razón is the perfect example. Is this going to be implemented any time soon? is it hard to fix?

The other thing i wanted to ask was how do one go about suggesting words to be added to the spanish dictionary and not just my user dictionary? if several people use it there's no point on each having a custom dictionary when we can all improve it together.

the dictionary is missing some really common words, like "los", which is the plural form of THE. where did you get this dictionary? can we see the word list somewhere? if not, at least I would like to know how many words it has, to see if I can find a better one

Thanks in advance

I have an idea from reading what Hilikus said. What if you had some sort of opt-in program where, once a month, you could configure SKP to upload your most common words anonymously to the server and new words and word usage count could be generated off of that. That way you wouldn't need to find an already existing word database, you would just need to get people using the software in the language to generate the word lists off of actual use.

I see this as a good option to keep the database up to date with how languages tend to change and may also make the vocabulary of the database better fit the vocabulary that is normally used on mobile devices.

I thought too it would be an interesting concept, but at least it should be done from another app as I don't want to give internet permission to the keyboard. I guess it also raises some privacy issues, but people would be aware of it...

i don't know...
there's lots of bad spellers in Spanish. I wouldn't want suggestions to incorrect words just because many people think that's how a word is written. Personally, if a keyboard or any dictionary for that matter, suggested a word that is incorrectly spelled i would uninstall the app right away.
See for example "confusión": I am sure that "confusion", "confución" and "confucion" would all make it into a widely, user-managed dictionary, but they are all incorrectly spelled.

It would be interesting maybe if the list of words had to be approved by a human editor, not just added automatically when > 20 people suggest it. But that's a bit unrealistic.
There's also local slang that shouldn't be in a Spanish dictionary; I for example use "pa" as a contraction of "para" so I have pa in my user dictionary, but I wouldn't want it in the Spanish dictionary for others to have it suggested

What about the other issue? suggesting the closer word (the one with an accent), that definitely sounds like a bug to me in the word distance algorithm

Since it's much easier to find an unsorted word list (such as a spell check dictionary), we could compare new words against the much larger database. Then the most common words that aren't in the dictionary could be human approved, but that list should be a lot smaller.

As for razon and razón, I would still like to see a did for this, if that is possible.

Thank you cyril for all the hard work!