Keyman Developer Tutorial
Create New Project
Session 1
This session we will create a keyboard project for the Dagbani language of Ghana. We will call the project DagbaniTutorial. We will create the project based upon the US keyboard. In this session we will also create a keyboard project for the Kamba language of Kenya. We will call the project KambaTutorial. We will create this project from a blank keyboard.
Create project from an existing Windows keyboard
1. Start Keyman Developer.
2. In the Project menu, click New Project.
3. Click Import Windows Keyboard, then click OK.
4. In the Select an underlying system keyboard list-box, select US (KBDUS.DLL), and then click OK.
5. In the New Basic Keyboard Project dialog box, do the following
- In the Keyboard Name box, enter DagbaniTutorial. Normally we would enter the language name.
- In the Copyright box, enter 2021 MyOrg. Normally we would enter the current year and the name of our organization or our own name.
- In the Version box, we will accept the default, since this is the first keyboard.
- In the Author box, enter Me. Normally we would enter our name.
- In the Targets box, set any. In this way it can work for all devices.
- In the Languages box, remove en (English) from the list and add the BCP 47 Tag of the desired language to the list. In our case we will add dag (Dagbani) to the list.
The dialog box should appear as below.
- Then click OK.
6. In the Project - Information dialog box, Click Keyboards. The Project – Keyboards dialog box appears, as below.
7. Then click dagbanitutorial.kmn. The Details pane appears, as below.
Click the Save icon to save our work. The project has been created.
8. We may want to change the size of the character font to meet our viewing needs. In the View menu, click on the Character Font. The Character Font dialog box appears. Make whatever changes we desire. Then click OK. This impacts the font that is used in the testing box.
9. We may want to change the size of the code font to meet our viewing needs. In the View menu, click on the Code Font. The Font dialog box appears. Make whatever changes we desire. Then click OK. This impacts the font that is used in the Keycoding box.
10. Click Layout. The Layout pane appears. Note that we see all this code that came from the US keyboard. In the next session, we will need to modify this code for Dagbani language.
11. To exit the program, in the File menu, click Exit.
Create a project from a blank keyboard
We will now create the KambaTutorial project
1. Start Keyman Developer.
2. In the Project menu, click New Project.
3. Click on Basic, then click OK.
4. In the New Basic Keyboard Project dialog box, do the following
- In the Keyboard Name box, enter KambaTutorial. Normally we would enter the language name.
- In the Copyright box, enter 2021 MyOrg. Normally we would enter the current year and the name of our organization or our own name.
- In the Version box, we will accept the default, since this is the first keyboard.
- In the Author box, enter Me. Normally we would enter our name.
- In the Targets box, set any. In this way it can work for all devices.
- In the Languages box, add the BCP 47 Tag of the desired language to the list. In our case we will add kam (Kamba) to the list.
The dialog box should appear as below.
- Then click OK.
5. In the Project - Information dialog box, Click Keyboards. The Project – Keyboards dialog box appears, as below.
6. Then click kambatutorial.kmn. The Details pane appears, as below.
7. Click on Layout. The Layout pane appears. Note that this time we see a keyboard layout image. This is because this keyboard is not based upon any other keyboard which is too complicated for Keyman Developer to display.
Click Code tab. We see just a few line codes that initialize an empty keyboard, as below. We do not see any code that would come from another keyboard.
8. Click the Save icon to save our work. The project has been created.
9. To exit the program, in the File menu, click Exit.