Keyman Developer Tutorial

Testing a Touch Keyboard

Session 7

This session we will test the touch keyboard for the Dagbani language of Ghana.

​​​​​​​1. Start Keyman Developer.

2. In the Project menu, point to Recent Projects, click DagbaniTutorial.kpj.

3. In the Project - Keyboard dialog box, click Keyboards. Then click dagbanitutorial.kmn.   The Details page appears.

​​​​​​​4. Click Build. The Build page appears.

5. Click Compile Keyboard. 

If the keyboard has compiled successfully, we will see two green messages saying Success: …  in the Message pane. If the messages are red, the compilation fails.  The error should indicate on what line in the code the error occurs. We will need to identify the error and then correct it and then recompile the keyboard.

We might see a warning like this: Warning: line 0 warning 2092: Key "T_new_579" on layer "default", platform "phone", is a custom key but has no corresponding rule in the source. This indicates that we forgot to enter the correct keycode for a new key we added. Double-check the long-press popup keys for one with a T_new_NNN code (T_new_579 in this example) and enter the desired U_NNNN code in the Code box.

The purpose of the T_new_NNN codes is so that we can write rules for these keys in the same way we do for physical keys.  If we add these key references which we can customize to anything (like T_Hook_Y_UC) to the code, then we make rules for them alongside the physical keyboard rules in the Code tab.

We might also see a message like this: Error: line 0 error 405A: Key "U+0181" on "phone", layer "default" has an invalid identifier.   This indicates that we attempted to change the keycode but mistyped the code. We may have gotten this more than once because we are used to typing U+0181 to refer to a Unicode value, but the correct syntax for a keycode in Keyman Developer is U_0181.

 

​​​​​​​6. After a successful compilation, we are ready to test the touch keyboard. We need to follow these instructions very carefully.

In the Keyboard menu, the Test Keyboard option only tests the desktop versions of a keyboard, not the mobile versions. To test a mobile keyboard, we can use the Chrome browser on the Windows computer to simulate a mobile device.

If the default browser is not Chrome. This may or may not work. If not, we will need to copy the URL and paste it into Chrome.

In the Web and Mobile Targets box, click Test Keyboard on web. Then click Open in browser.

 

The browser appears. Now set the Keyboard to dagbanitutorial. Set the Device to Pixel 5.   Now the mobile keyboard is ready for testing.

Then press various keys on the mobile keyboard to verify that the mobile keyboard is working as expected.  Note that keys that have dot in the upper right-hand corner have long-press keys.  If so, we are done testing.  If not, we need to fix the problems in the Touch Layout section.

 

 

 

​​​​​​​7. Close the browser.

We have completed our testing