Design Team/Proposals/Touchscreen/On-screen Keyboard
Existing solutions
GNOME shell on screen keyboard
Gnome 3.2 on-screen Keyboard originally a GSoC 2011 project by Nohemi Fernandez, mentored by Dan Winship. Here is the original design document, project report, an interesting bugzilla thread, feature status pages, and a post from Nohemi's blog.
And here is the GNOME shell keyboard code. It is part of GNOME 3.2 (Fedora 16). You can get to it when you click on the accessibility button at the top right of the screen and enable 'Screen Keyboard'. It will come up then when you click in the url entry in Epiphany or if you bring it up by hand. It does not come up automatically when you want to type in the google search for example.
Caribou is the backend used with the gnome-shell onscreen keyboard. You can choose between different layouts which are placed in Fedora under '/usr/share/caribou/layouts/'. The layouts are in XML format. For the touch layout there is one for arabic and one for hebrew.
You can get the current layout with:
gsettings get org.gnome.shell.keyboard keyboard-type
You can change the layout with:
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.keyboard keyboard-type fullscale
Maliit
Malit You can run Maliit on Fedora 16: https://wiki.maliit.org/Documentation/Installing#Fedora and did run the "maliit-keyboard-viewer" example: https://wiki.maliit.org/Documentation/Running
There are many different layouts for languages like German, French, Arabic and so on, in Fedora they are stored under '/usr/share/maliit/plugins/languages/'. The format of the layouts is XML.