Possibility to NOT use accent marks in SMS?

Hi Cyril,

first of all THANKS for you brilliant keyboard. Love it. Really. It is by far the best keyboard I've tried so far.

Now to my request/problem. I'm Czech, so I use your Czech layout quite often, but there is one quite annoying problem while writing SMS with that. If I use Czech layout, my predictive text function switches to Czech, and is suggesting words with diacritic marks, like á, í or ř, the phone automatically switches the encoding of the text to Unicode, instead of plain ASCII. That means that SMS can only be something like 60 characters instead of 160

It is of course possible to not use predictive text, but other then this issue it's working great.

So you see that for us it would be great if your keyboard could actually take the suggested word and replace the special chars with regular ASCII alternative while being in the SMS application, which is the way most people send SMS in Czech Republic anyway since most of the dumb phones do this replacing automatically... I'm not sure if you can detect what application is using the keyboard, I just thought it would be great feature.

Hi
in my opinion it should be a feature of the messaging app (I think Handcent do this), not of the keyboard.
But yes the keyboard can know what is the current app, however I think it will be difficult for it to know that it's currently writing a SMS (the app is supposed to give this information to the keyboard, but it doesn't work in all apps, for instance not in the HTC messaging app)
I need to think about it... (and I have the same problem in french, where "ç" divides the SMS length by 2...)

Hi Cyril,

there is some option in Handcent to remove chars on sending the message, but I am not totally sure how does it work (also the chars counter is still at 70, as the above operation takes place on sending, not while editing, so it's not as user-friendly). If your (BTW: brilliant one) keyboard cannot trust the messaging app to tell whether it's SMSing or else, perhaps you can make the removing of accents toggable and let the user decide? I personally would find the best option to add a new action for gestures, what do you think? Once again, thanks for this great keyboard.

in my opinion it should be a feature of the messaging app (I think Handcent do this), not of the keyboard

I asked because I know that one keyboard does this (HTC_IME), but I like your keyboard a lot more.

If there is such a feature in Handcent, I didn't find it - I know it's being requested a lot on the Handcent forums.

Yes I'll try to do something... Give me some time

Hello again,

any progress on this issue? Is it somewhere on the roadmap?

Thanks for your replies...

It's in the roadmap but I am very busy as you can imagine

for any Czech guys out there, HandcentSMS added option to remove Czech accents in SMS

@cyril: thanks for your prompt responses, I can now use the keyboard fully, so I finally bought the full version....

Hi!

I just tried MANY keyboards from many people, htc, super, atd atd but I must tell you, Yours is the BEST from all.
I'm from Czech Rep and I really love your keyboard - don't want to use anything else ever in the future. But as a Czech person, I've got the problem with 160 -> 60 chars because of ours accents ě š č ř ž ý á í é ů.
I see that you know about this issue for a year now so I wanted to ask you if you advanced somewhere.
That would be brilliant.

P.S. for people who will tell me to use HandcentSMS: I'm using GO sms because it's quicker and I like it much more than Handcent.

Edit: I take it back. The app Go Sms (now Go Sms Pro) has the possibility of Local Support for my country So I'm using your app and I'm really happy with it now ^_^
Maybe small "think". I've got Xperia x10 mini Pro and when I write on my hardware keyboard and press the Symbol button (right bottom) there aren't smiles but it's like I hit a Alt key. If that could be modified I'll be really glad and many people too

Unfortunately not every sms app has implemented this feature (many users use default android app!). Is this feature still on TODO list?

Thanks very for answer.
PS: Smart Keyboard is awesome, have PRO version of course:-)

I've recently installed Smart Keyboard and out of those that I tried it's hands down the best one. However the Czech dictionary using the accented characters simply doesn't suit me as I use non-accented words both in SMSs and emails. Therefore I decided to temporarily solve the problem by populating custom dictionary with all (sic) the words in their non-accented form. It gives solid results when writing using the T9 or compact mode. However, it's far from perfect. Here comes few notes:

1. Word list used - I used a word list that comes with PSPad - the older/smaller version is IMHO based on the dictionary that comes with Mozilla Thunderbird. It contains cca 350000 words. Many of them most of the Czech people have never used and never will. Yet it doesn't contain all the possible forms (declension, conjugation) of some of the common words. The newer/bigger version probably contains all of the words and their forms. There's cca 800000 words and this seems to be a bit too many for Smart Keyboard to handle as there are some lags when typing and the app takes a lot of memory. What we would need is a word list of 10000 commonly used words + all their possible forms. IMHO such a word list is not freely available.

2. Import of the words - Smart Keyboard is not really capable to import such a word list so I simply copied userdic.db and populated the database on my PC. Being no expert on SQLite, I used SQLite Administrator to import the words from a CSV file. It took a couple of hours to import.

3. Result - as alredy mentioned, the result is quite good for the T9 or compact mode. However, it doesn't give any good results in the full keyboard as the app doesn't know the "weight" of the words and thus it doesn't come up with any good predictions. It probably will once you write a LOT of text but hey then you don't need a wordlist anyway as the app would learn the words itself. The only solution that comes to my mind is to take all the emails that I've written in the past years, parse the words and populate the frequencies table in the userdic.db. I'm not sure I want to spend time doing it.