Shell extensions and key stroke capturing...

Question

Hello. Me and my team are working on a project which converts English input from a QWERTY keyboard to Unicodes local Indian languages like Kannada, Tamil etc. We're using Java and SWT for UI. The program should run in such a way that once the program is running, wherever the user enters, he should be able to see the unicodes/indian language output. That is, the program should be a shell extension or a it must run in the background and capture the keystrokes of the active window the user is using. We are developing this software for both windows and linux. So is it possible to create shell extensions or implement the background window(process)?
Are there APIs in linux to capture key strokes?? Is it possible to use Win32 WinHooks in windows to capture the key strokes??
Edited by: abhinav_zoso on Jan 8, 2009 11:35 PM

Answer 1

Are there APIs in linux to capture key strokes?? Is it possible to use Win32 WinHooks in windows to capture the key strokes??Those are not java questions. Programming forums specific to the OS will provide the answer. Or docs for that matter.
... which converts English input from a QWERTY keyboard to Unicodes local Indian languagesThat by itself doesn't make much sense unless you are talking about language translation rather than characters.
The ASCII code set which would normally represent the entire english character set, is part of unicode. So no conversion needed.
But perhaps you merely wish to map set of keystrokes into other characters? I would strongly suppose that at least windows already supports this in some format so I am not sure why you need java in the mix. Certainly, for example, if you had a computer set up to display another language character set and you want to put a key stroke interceptor in place that should be possible. And if the computer is not set up to display the language then what is the point?