him-hebrew - virtual keyboard package
culmus-nachlieli-light - font package (not required if there are already other Hebrew fonts installed)
The source package and an i386 package for scratchbox can be found on the garage download page.
The various input methods in the tablet do not allow input of Hebrew characters. This package adds a virtual keyboard with Hebrew keys.
The layout is similar to the standard English/Hebrew hardware keyboards (screenshot).
The keyboard has two modes: "En" for English keys and "He" for Hebrew keys (and English upper case). Use the mode key (labeled with either "En" or "He") to switch between the modes.
To use the keyboard, after the package is installed, bring up the default input method by clicking in some text input field of some application. Then select "keyboard (Hebrew)" in the "Input Method >" menu. Click on the "En" button on the left to switch to Hebrew layout (the button label will change to "He").
Currently, both "En" and "He" modes feature the same English upper case layout when shift is used. The only difference is that in "En" the shift mode resets after one letter input, and in "He" it persists until it is clicked again.
The standard stylus gestures are supported: up for shift, down for enter, right for space and left for backspace. The gestures stay the same in "He" mode (can be considered a bug). The gesture must be long enough so that the stylus is dragged outside the button in which it was originally pressed.
Note that the input method might not be enabled if the regional settings are not for English (US or UK).
Unlike the (non-Hebrew) built in virtual keyboard, this input method does not support dictionary based word completion.
Only OS2008 (Maemo chinook and diablo) is supported.
Download and install the him-hebrew package in the tablet, then reboot.
Hebrew fonts are required.
By default the tablet does not have Hebrew fonts, which are also needed for viewing Hebrew documents. If Hebrew fonts are already installed, then the virtual keyboard should be able to use them.
The culmus-nachlieli-light package is an ad-hoc light weight package that contains one set of Hebrew fonts in the TrueType format and can be installed with the Application Manager - a reboot might be necessary. The package was generated by extracting and converting fonts from the Debian package for Culmus with this script.
Alternatively, any Unicode font package that contains Hebrew glyphs can be
installed. One such package is ttf-dejavu and is available in
the "maemo Extras" repository. It can be installed from the command line
by running as root:
apt-get install ttf-dejavu(The command line is needed, because the package section does not match
user/* and therefore is not listed in the Application Manager).
Please note that this package is quite large and covers many Unicode fonts.
This project is based on the hildon-input-method-plugins-example source. Check out the garage project page.
Please direct any comments, suggestions or requests to obb770 (no spam please) at gmail (you can guess the rest).