Dead and Compose keys (was: Re: Romanized Singhala got great reception in Sri Lanka)

[Andrew Cunningham]

Chris,

Keyman is capable of doing that and a lot more,  but few keyboard layout
developers use it to its full potential.

As an example,  I was asked by Harari teachers here in Melbourne to develop
a set of three keyboard layouts for them and their students.
The three keyboards were for three different orthographies in the following
scripts:
1) Latin
2) Ethiopic
3) Arabic

They wanted all three layouts to work identically,  using the keystrokes
used on the Latin keyboard.

The Ethiopic and Arabic keyboard layouts required extensive remapping of
key sequences to output.

If I was a programmer I could have done something more elegant by building
an external library Keyman could call but as it is we could do a lot inside
the Keyman keyboard layout itself.

For Myanmar script keyboard layouts we allow visual input for the e-vowel
sign and medial Ra,  with the layout handling reordering.

One of the Latin layouts I use,  supports combining diacritics and reorders
sequences of diacritics to their canonical order regardless of order of
input. Assuming a maximum of one diacritic below and two diacrtics above
base character.
Analysis and creativity can produce some very effective Keyman layouts.

Andrew
 On 18/03/2014 7:23 PM, "Christopher Fynn" <chris.fynn at gmail.com> wrote:

> MSKLC and KeyMan are fairly crude ways of creating input methods
>
> For what you want to - you probably need a memory resident program
> that traps the Latin input from the keyboard, processes the
> (transliterated) input strings converting them into unicode Sinhala
> strings, and then injects these back into the input queue  in place of
> the Latin characters.
>
> There are a couple of utilities that do this for typing
> transliterated/romanised Tibetan in Windows and getting  Tibetan
> Unicode output.
> http://tise.mokhin.org/
> http://www.thubtenrigzin.fr/denjongtibtype/en.html
>
> But I think both of these were written in C as they have to do a lot
> of processing which is far beyond what can be accomplished with MSKLC
> and even KeyMan
>
> - C
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