Typing around the world

Native North American Keyboards

We've recently published a stack of Native North Amercian keyboards courtesy of Chris Harvey. The list of keyboards are:

• Haisla Unicode
• Kwak'wala Unicode
• Uwikala Unicode
• Diitiidatx Unicode
• Nuuchahnulth Unicode
• SENCOTEN Unicode
• St'at'imcets Unicode
• Skwxwumesh Unicode
• Shashishalhem Unicode
• Halq´eméylem Unicode
• Henqeminem Unicode
• Klallam Unicode
• Lushootseed Unicode
• Nle'kepmxcin Unicode
• Okanagan Unicode
• Secwepemctsín Unicode

This adds to over a dozen other native American keyboards that Chris has already published.

If you would like to type in these languages, you can download these keyboards here: Keyman North Amercian Keyboards.

Again a big thank you to Chris for his efforts!

New Khowar keyboard for Keyman Desktop

Khowar, also known as Chitrali is a regional language of Pakistan, and spoken by approximately 100,000 people in Pakistan, China and Afghanistan.

The Khowar alphabet is a right-to-left script, typically written in Nasta’liq and comprised of 60 letters. This particular keyboard layout was designed by Rehmat Aziz Chitrali, an eminent Khowar linguist and president of the Khowar Academy of Chitral in Pakistan. Developing this keyboard presented some unique challenges, particularly finding fonts that supported all khowar characters. Currently only Windows 8 has 100% coverage with the following fonts:

• Arial
•  Microsoft Sans Serif
• Tahoma
• Times New Roman

To download this keyboard, visit: http://keymankeyboards.com/?id=659

Atomic Chillus - adding some spice to Mozhi Malayalam

Malayalam is an Indian language mainly spoken in the south west of the country, and particularly in Kerala and the surronding states. Spoken by approximately 38 million people, it is also present in Bahrain, Fiji, Israel, Malaysia, Qatar, Singapore, UAE and the UK.

One of the interesting aspects of Brahmic scripts (of which Malayalam is a descendant) is that all consonants have an inherent vowel. Brahmic scripts use diacritics to modify this vowel, and viramas which are a type of diacritic to suppress the vowel entirely. For example:

1. क is a consonant letter, ka,
2. ् is a virama; therefore,
3. क् (ka + virama) represents a dead consonant k.

Now chillus represent 6 pure consonants independently without using a virama- NN, N, RR, L, LL and K. These consonants are never followed by an inherent vowel.

We've added support for chillus using unicode 5.1 standards, which represent them atomically (that is as a single codepoint)- previously chillus were written by combining 3 different code points.

 

 

If you're interested in giving Mozhi Malayalam a try, head over to KeymanWeb here: KeymanWeb Malayalam Mozhi or get our bookmarklet for your browser: Malayalam Mozhi Bookmarklet

New Yorùbá Keyboards for KeymanWeb and Keyman Desktop

For all of you who speak and write èdè Yorùbá, we are announcing three new Yorùbá keyboards:

• Yorùbá with Dot for KeymanWeb is a simple Unicode keyboard for the Yorùbá language, using the modern dot under the letters ẹ, ọ and ṣ. Find out more from the help guide.
• Yorùbá with Bar for KeymanWeb is the same simple Unicode keyboard but using the traditional bar under the letters e̩, o̩, and s̩. Here is the help guide.
• Yorùbá 8 for Keyman Desktop combines both keyboards into a single Unicode keyboard for the Yorùbá language with the option to use either the modern dot or the traditional bar under the letters ẹ, ọ and ṣ. Here is the help guide.

For those of you who don't yet know about èdè Yorùbá, it's a tonal, SVO, Niger-Congo language spoken by over a quarter of a million people in Nigeria, Benin, and around the world. In addition to the three special letters which use a dot or bar below, Yorùbá also has the digraph letter GB and a collection of accents to indicate tones. Now you know!

Time to give Yorùbá a try on Keyman Desktop or KeymanWeb.

A Dedicated Tibetan Page + Revised Keyboards

Mount Kailash image courtesy of Reurinkjan, under Create Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.

Today we have two bits of Tibetan good news:

• We're rolling out a dedicated Tibetan minisite, so that you can find our best Tibetan keyboards in one place.
• We've updated the Tibetan Unicode Direct Input and Tibetan Unicode EWTS keyboard packages, including brand new comprehensive help guides.

About the Script + Speech

For a bit of background, the Tibetan script was developed in the 7th century as a means of bringing Buddhist texts to Tibet from India. It is most closely related to the Indian Brahmic scripts. Although the script is most often associated with the language Tibetan, today it used to write many other languages as well, including Dzongkha, Sanskrit, Ladakhi, and Sikkimese.

About the Keyboards

The popular Tibetan Unicode EWTS keyboard by Linguasoft is based on the Extended Wylie Transliteration Scheme (EWTS). The keyboard makes typing Tibetan easier by avoiding Shift, Alt, and Alt+Shift combinations. The newly revised version of the keyboard includes a complete help guide to assist you in using all of its many features.

Also by Linguasoft, Tibetan Unicode Direct Input is an especially simple phonetic-style Tibetan keyboard. You get a Tibetan character directly, every time you press a key, so there is no need to remember complex keystroke or transliteration combinations. If you do not already know EWTS, and maybe even if you do, you'll really enjoy this keyboard. Again, the new version includes a guide to help you find and use every feature of the keyboard. 

The Dzongkha keyboard is designed specifically for the Dzongkha language, which has a different frequency of letters than Tibetan. It follows the official layout approved by the Bhutanese government.

Now it's your turn to test out all three keyboards from our new Tibetan minisite.

ScriptSource and Keyman now sharing keyboard knowledge

Over the last few months, you may have noticed a new help link popping up in Keyman keyboard searches:

ScriptSource is a new initiative from the folks at SIL, designed to be a:

"dynamic, collaborative reference to the writing systems of the world, with detailed information on scripts, characters, languages - and the remaining needs for supporting them in the computing realm."

Today, we're proud to announce that ScriptSource now also links back to over 250 Keyman Desktop and KeymanWeb keyboards, making it even easier for people to find the best keyboards for their languages. The Keyman entries look like this:

If you haven't visited ScriptSource yet, we encourage you to head on over, have a look, and get involved in the initiative of creating a unified collaborative reference for all the world's scripts.

 

Presentations at Upcoming Conferences

I'm excited to announce that I (Marc Durdin) will be presenting at the Internationalization and Unicode Conference 36 in October, on the topic "From Typewriter to Touch: Multi Platform Keyboards -- Challenges and Illustrations". I will be walking through a number of the complexities and challenges that may not be immediately obvious both when using and when designing keyboard layouts for all manner of modern platforms. Over the last 20 years, I've built up quite the laundry list of troubles that people encounter when trying to type in almost any language on computers, and during this presentation I hope to air some of the more fascinating issues that I've happened upon.

In August, I will be running a similar presentation at the My Language Conference 2012, in Brisbane Australia, with a focus on situations that government organisations, especially libraries and other cultural institutions, may be encountering.

Finally, back at the Unicode Conference, I will be also running a tutorial on the first day on designing a cross platform keyboard using Tavultesoft Keyman technology.  In this tutorial, using a specific example, I'll be taking attendees through core design principles around keyboard layouts that we've developed in the last 20 years, and from there into some of the complexities that arise when you try and provide a consistent, yet tailored approach for various platforms, including touch devices such as mobile phones, tablets, as well as desktop computers.  Designing input methods for touch is of course a fairly new area for me as well, and I'm looking forward to running this session and sharing the knowledge I have acquired, and probably learning a lot in the process!

I hope to see you at the Unicode Conference or the My Language Conference -- or both!  Having attended both conferences on multiple occasions previously, I have found both are invaluable forums for learning more about working with languages on computers!

Programmatic access to Tavultesoft's keyboard catalogue

For those of you with a web programming bent, the following may be of interest.  We now have 2 APIs available for accessing the Keyman Desktop and KeymanWeb keyboard catalogues.  Both APIs are RESTful and return UTF-8 JSON format data only in their initial incarnation.

Updated 25 Jun 2012: Please note the minor changes to the format returned from the V1.0 API below.

KeymanWeb Keyboards

This would provide links to web-based keyboards that allow you to type the language directly into a field in the browser without any need to install any software, hosted on our site www.keymanweb.com.  The KeymanWeb API is documented at http://help.keymanweb.com/dev/webapi.php.  The only other piece you need for this puzzle is the link to the live KeymanWeb keyboard, which can be generated using the language id and the keyboard id as follows:
    http://www.keymanweb.com/go/language/keyboard/notepad

So example, to link to the Egyptian Hieroglyphic keyboard, you would link to
    http://www.keymanweb.com/go/egy/hieroglyphic/notepad

Keyman Desktop Keyboards

This API is similar to the KeymanWeb API.  Basically, you can access the full list of keyboards, grouped by language, by calling the following URI:
    http://www.tavultesoft.com/api/1.0/languages

Updated 25 Jun 2012: The API has had a minor update: keyboard values are now normalised to reduce the size of the response.  This minor change was made because the API was still fresh and we wanted to fix this before it became ingrained; don't worry, we won't be fiddling with the structure in breaking ways like this in the future!  We also added the description member to keyboard data (this, however, is a non-breaking change).

The response for the query for all language information will be similar to the following:

{
"languages":[
  {
   "name":"Lao",
   "id":"lao",
   "country":"LA",
   "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/?q=l:iso:lao",
   "keyboards":[443,472,442,431,315,304]
  },
  …
],
"keyboards":[
      {
         "name":"Lao 2008",
         "id":443,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/443",
         "version":"1.0.2",
         "lastModified":"2009-06-22 17:12:38.083",
         "description":"a keyboard description ..."
      },
      {
         "name":"Lao Basic",
         "id":472,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/472",
         "version":"1.0",
         "lastModified":"2009-05-15 16:18:56.430",
         "description":"a keyboard description ..."
      },
      {
         "name":"Lao Script for Windows",
         "id":442,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/442",
         "version":"",
         "lastModified":"2008-08-29 15:45:12.597",
         "description":"a keyboard description ..."
      },
      {
         "name":"Lao Unicode on Thai Keyboard layout",
         "id":431,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/431",
         "version":"1.1",
         "lastModified":"2008-03-24 21:17:19.230",
         "description":"a keyboard description ..."
      },
      {
         "name":"Enhanced Lao (non-Unicode)",
         "id":315,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/315",
         "version":"1.1",
         "lastModified":"2012-02-07 10:43:41.633",
         "description":"a keyboard description ..."
      },
      {
         "name":"Simple Lao (non-Unicode)",
         "id":304,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/304",
         "version":"1.0",
         "lastModified":"2009-05-15 16:53:21.010",
         "description":"a keyboard description ..."
      },
      …
 ]}

Updated 25 Jun 2012: You can retrieve a single language record by appending the language code, e.g. http://www.tavultesoft.com/api/1.0/languages/lao.  When a single language is queried in this way, the return value folds the keyboards array in as per the example below for Lao.

{
   "name":"Lao",
   "id":"lao",
   "country":"LA",
   "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/?q=l:iso:lao",
   "keyboards":[
      {
         "name":"Lao 2008",
         "id":443,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/443",
         "version":"1.0.2",
         "lastModified":"2009-06-22 17:12:38.083"
      },
      {
         "name":"Lao Basic",
         "id":472,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/472",
         "version":"1.0",
         "lastModified":"2009-05-15 16:18:56.430"
      },
      {
         "name":"Lao Script for Windows",
         "id":442,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/442",
         "version":"",
         "lastModified":"2008-08-29 15:45:12.597"
      },
      {
         "name":"Lao Unicode on Thai Keyboard layout",
         "id":431,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/431",
         "version":"1.1",
         "lastModified":"2008-03-24 21:17:19.230"
      },
      {
         "name":"Enhanced Lao (non-Unicode)",
         "id":315,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/315",
         "version":"1.1",
         "lastModified":"2012-02-07 10:43:41.633"
      },
      {
         "name":"Simple Lao (non-Unicode)",
         "id":304,
         "uri":"http:\/\/keymankeyboards.com\/304",
         "version":"1.0",
         "lastModified":"2009-05-15 16:53:21.010"
      }
   ]
}

Dzongkha Keyboard for Desktop and Web Now Available

We've added an official Dzongkha layout for Keyman Desktop and for KeymanWeb and we think you should be excited.

Language, Script + Keyboard

Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, is spoken by over 170,000 people worldwide. The language is written using the Tibetan script, which was developed from Devanagari in the 7th century originally for the Tibetan language.

At Tavultesoft we've offered a collection of great Tibetan keyboards for a number of years. However, as with different Latin-script languages, Dzongkha uses a different frequency of letters than Tibetan and requires a different keyboard. The new Keyman Dzongkha keyboard meets that need, following the official Dzongkha layout as approved by the government of Bhutan in 2009.

The Dzongkha keyboard places all of the letters necessary for Dzongkha and Tibetan on four shift states. Basic characters are typed with unshifted keys. Subjoined glyphs and other important characters can be added with the Shift key. Rarer characters are under the AltGr key, with subjoined rare glyphs and other rare characters under Shift+AltGr. (On KeymanWeb, AltGr can be accessed via Ctrl+Alt). The keyboard also offers four different spacing characters:

• Tibetan Tsheg on the Spacebar
• Latin Space on Shift+Spacebar
• Non-breaking Tsheg on AltGr+Spacebar
• Non-breaking Space on Shift+AltGr+Spacebar

Use it Today

You can start using Dzongkha today. Download Dzongkha to use with all your favourite Windows applications, or visit KeymanWeb and use it live, as a bookmarklet, or on your website.

Now Typing N'Ko

This June we published a keyboard for the N'Ko script, a writing system designed in the 1940s to meet the needs of African languages. There are a number of exciting ways you can use the new N'Ko keyboard:

• Download to type in all your Windows applications
• Type online in KeymanWeb Live
• Install a bookmarklet to type anywhere on the Web
• Run on your website

About the Script

The Guinean Soulemana Kante designed N'Ko in the late 1940's to provide Africans with a native script. Today the script is most commonly used for a collection of Mande languages in a region of West Africa centred on Guinea and spreading north to Senegal and Mali, east to Burkina Faso, and south to Ivory Coast. Inspired by Arabic and French, the script is written right-to-left in a cursive line, but employs a full alphabet of consonants and vowels, with diacritics to indicate vowel nasalisation, length, and tone.

About the Keyboard

Our new N'Ko keyboard is phonetic, crafted to be easy to type for anyone familiar with a standard QWERTY layout. Most letters are typed using the phonetically similar Latin letter or letter combination. When one Latin letter matches more than one N'Ko letter, the extra N'Ko letter can be found on the shift key. For example, e produces 'ߍ', but E produces 'ߋ'. 

Displaying N'Ko Correctly

N'Ko letters join together like Arabic when they display correctly. Many modern fonts and applications wrongly display the letters of N'Ko in an un-joined form. A Graphite font and a Graphite-enabled application are necessary to correctly display N'Ko.

An excellent Graphite font for N'Ko is Conakry, installed with the N'Ko keyboard package. To browse the Internet in N'Ko, you should use Firefox with Graphite-support enabled (Firefox is currently the only browser supporting graphite). On your Desktop, LibreOffice and OpenOffice support Graphite right out of the box. For more options, check out SIL's list of Graphite-enabled applications.

Take N'Ko for a Spin

Once you've set up Graphite correctly, download N'Ko for Keyman Desktop or visit KeymanWeb Live to give the N'Ko keyboard a try now.