Advance Preparation

Bring an orthography statement on the language.

Are tone marks or accents considered independently? Or are they considered part of a unit?  Should backspace remove just the tone, or should it delete the whole unit? Are digraphs considered separate characters or a unit?

Prepare keyboard layout grids for the language

Physical keyboards

Have participants fill out a keyboard grid for both the normal and shift layers for their target language. Here are two different grids to choose from:

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Mobile Keyboards

Two Basic mobile grids + long press list.

Keyman Dev basic training

Create a folder for the project on your hard drive

• It is good to maintain a clear file structure. Later you may be submitting your directory with all the files to GitHub.
• It is also important to always include the source files with the distribution so that they can be modified and upgraded.

Create a project in Keyman Developer

• Save it inside of the directory you created.

Create a keyboard in the project

• Note: Keyboard filename should be all lowercase for cross-platform compatibility.
• Name keyboard
• Choose targets:
  • ​Windows, Mac, Linux (not active yet), iPhone, iPad, androidphone, androidtablet
• ​Add copyright, version
• Add features
  • ​Desktop Onscreen keyboard
  • Touch optimized keyboard
    • ​Select template-basic.js

Create the layout onscreen first

• Copy from your paper template

Switch to code view to create the logic

• Might be better to avoid “dead” keys or comma/semicolon modifier keys if it isn’t too disruptive. Keys that modify after are more easily discoverable.
• Should output NFC
• Avoid using groups in this introduction to keyboard building.

Create an onscreen keyboard

• Fill from layout

Create a mobile keyboard

• Select template-basic.js
• Import onscreen keyboard
• Select basic template again
• Arrange the keys as needed visually.
• Add the output code
  • K_A - Virtual keys
  • U_NNN - Unicode direct output
    • If your physical keyboard is already outputting the code 
  • T_NNN - Touch variables for use in coding logic.
• Create long press characters
• Add the output code for the longpress characters (as explained above)

Compile the keyboard

Test the keyboard

• Type a whole page of text in the language

Create the documentation for the keyboard

• HTML file that will be shown on installation, within the app it will appear in help menus. (Use LibreOffice Write to create html docs, not Word.)
• Include pictures of the layout

Make the Keyman Package

• Name the package file (lowercase)
• Specify the language(s)
• Bundling fonts doesn’t work well on mobile except that you can specify the font used on the keyboard display.

Practise installing

• On windows with Keyman Desktop
• On Android with Keyman Mobile

Submit to Keyman

• Using GitHub, but that is a whole lesson in itself. Find out how on this page.

https://help.keyman.com/developer/keyboards/

 

Mnemonic vs Positional

Mnemonic can avoid having to create different keyboards for French/German/US/UK computers.  But much thought needs to go into the actuators used. Alt+GR is a good key in this situation