Typing around the world

Keyman 8 Beta Announcement

I'm very pleased to announce that we are today publishing the first beta of Keyman Desktop 8.  This preview release of Keyman Desktop 8 includes a bunch of new features and most importantly full x64 support.

This release is very incomplete but we wanted to get the new beta x64 support out for some of our loyal users who have been begging us to get it finished for quite some time now, and also to give this new functionality a chance to be tested rigorously in the wild.

Some other the new functionality that has made it into this release:

• "Select keyboard for all applications" option: when you choose a keyboard layout, the keyboard layout is selected for all running applications
• Mnemonic layout support for On Screen Keyboard: Mnemonic layouts will now work even better on European keyboards
• Unicode 5.2 support and enhanced Character Map and Font Helper utilities

Keyman Desktop 8 will be supported on Windows XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003 and Server 2008.  This release is compatible with Keyman Desktop 7.1 but will overwrite any existing Keyman Desktop 7 installation.  Keyman Desktop 7.1 licenses will work with this beta release of Keyman Desktop 8.  You cannot install both Keyman Desktop 7 and Keyman Desktop 8 concurrently.  We recommend that you turn off the "Start with Windows" option in case you run into a serious bug in the beta.

Follow our progress

No new software product announcement would be complete without a Twitter feed!  I'll be reporting on the status of Keyman Desktop 8 development using the #keyman8 tag on my account @mcdurdin.  Use the tag #keyman8 when you tweet about Keyman 8 and our development team will see your comments instantly -- well, assuming we are not asleep.

• Twitter: @mcdurdin (Keyman 8 development lead) and @tavultesoft (all Tavultesoft news)
• RSS: mcdurdin

Tell us about your experience

• Twitter: @mcdurdin (Use the #keyman8 tag)
• Email: beta@tavultesoft.com
• Web: http://www.tavultesoft.com/forums/category.php?ForumCategoryID=330

Download the beta

• Beta Download Home Page
  
• The Beta Download Home page lists currently known issues and bug fixes in the release.

Differences in KeymanWeb and Keyman Desktop keyboard source files

Most Keyman Desktop keyboards can be compiled for KeymanWeb without modification.  However, there are a few platform differences that it is important to be aware of, and a few differences in the supported Keyman Keyboard Language features between Keyman Desktop and KeymanWeb.  The table below details the differences.

Feature	Keyman Desktop	KeymanWeb	Notes
Basic features
Mnemonic layouts	Supported	Limited support	Mnemonic layouts are supported in KeymanWeb but only a subset of European keyboards are currently supported. See the notes under 'Detect system keyboard layout' for more information.
call statement	Windows DLL	Javascript function	In Keyman Desktop, this calls into a Windows DLL as defined in the referenced store, whereas the KeymanWeb version calls a Javascript function which must be included with the &KMW_EmbedJS system store
notany statement	Supported	Compile Error	This feature may be supported in a future version of KeymanWeb
return statement	Supported	Compile Error	This feature may be supported in a future version of KeymanWeb
nul statement in context	Supported	Compile error	In KeymanWeb, nul would correspond to the beginning of the text field or run of text, rather than an empty context cache. This will be supported in a future version of KeymanWeb
Deadkeys within stores	Supported	Compile error	Deadkeys can be used in Keyman Desktop stores with the index() statement. In KeymanWeb, this produces a compiler error. This may be supported in a future version of KeymanWeb
index and context statements in context	Supported	Compile error	These may be supported in a future version of KeymanWeb
&bitmap system store	Supported	Ignored
&hotkey system store	Supported	Ignored
&language system store	Supported	Ignored
&windowslanguages system store	Supported	Ignored
KeymanWeb-only features
&KMW_EmbedJS system store	Ignored	Supported
&KMW_RTL system store	Ignored	Supported	To support right-to-left in a Keyman Desktop keyboard, associate it with a right-to-left locale using the &Language system store
&KMW_Help system store &KMW_HelpFile system store	Ignored	Supported	Custom on-screen keyboard help for Keyman Desktop can be implemented with the usage.htm file
Virtual Keys and Modifiers Keys
CAPS, NCAPS modifier states	Supported	Ignored	Ignoring caps lock state may lead to conflicting rules in KeymanWeb when using + [NCAPS K_*] and + [CAPS K_*], so these rules should be prefixed with $KeymanOnly:.
&capsononly, &capsalwaysoff, &shiftfreescaps system stores	Supported	Ignored	KeymanWeb does not modify the action of the Caps Lock key
LALT, RALT, LCTRL, RCTRL modifier states	Supported	Ignored	Rules with these modifier states will never be matched in KeymanWeb: most browsers do not distinguish between left and right ctrl/alt, so KeymanWeb never tries to support them.
Virtual character keys	Supported	Compile error	This feature may be supported in a future version of KeymanWeb
Virtual keys in mnemonic layouts	Supported	Compile error	This feature may be supported in a future version of KeymanWeb
Virtual key output	Works, unsupported	Compile error	Virtual key output works in Keyman Desktop but is not supported by Tavultesoft and is not recommended — it is the wrong way to solve a problem, in the majority of situations. KeymanWeb does not support virtual key output and there are no plans to support this in the future in KeymanWeb.
Detect system keyboard layout	Supported	Configurable	KeymanWeb cannot reliably determine the system keyboard layout in use in the browser. The basic assumption is a US English keyboard layout, but this can be overridden by an implementor to specify and alternative layout. If an implementor specifies the system keyboard layout correctly, both mnemonic and positional layouts will translate correctly.
Legacy features
Codepage-based keyboards	Supported	Compile Error	Non-Unicode keyboards are not supported in KeymanWeb
&OldCharPosMatching system store	Legacy	Ignored	This is a legacy feature for older Keyman Desktop keyboards. Keyboards using this feature should be updated to use Keyman 6 character position matching
switch statement	Not supported	Compile Error	The switch statement is deprecated and no longer works in Keyman Desktop.
fix and clearcontext statements	Supported	Compile Error	Context is always read from the active element with a KeymanWeb keyboard so clearing the cached context is not a logical action. These statements are deprecated.
&layout system store	Ignored	Ignored	This system store is deprecated
Compile targets
Lines with $KeymanOnly: prefix	Supported	Ignored
Lines with $KeymanWeb: prefix	Ignored	Supported
Lines with $Keyman: prefix	Supported	Supported	For historical reasons, KeymanWeb keyboards also process $Keyman:-prefixed lines. The $KeymanOnly: prefix is intended to resolve this issue.
Lines with $weaver:, $kmfl: prefixes	Ignored	Ignored	These compile targets are for Mac OS 9 and Linux

KeymanWeb Developer Reference Documentation

• KeymanWeb Developer Documentation
• KeymanWeb User Documentation
• Keyman Developer Reference Documentation

Using KeymanWeb in Wikipedia

A month ago we blogged about our new KeymanWeb Wikipedia Plugin. Now you can use KeymanWeb to type in your native language anywhere in Wikipedia. That's right - without a specialised keyboard, you can edit pages, search for information, or participate in discussions in over 200 languages, including languages like Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew, Mandarin, Russian, Tibetan, and Yoruba, to name just a few.

In this post, I would like to show you how to install and use the KeymanWeb Wikipedia Plugin.

1. First, you need to copy a line of code to your clipboard.
   
   • For English Wikipedia users, copy this importScript line:
     
            importScript('User:Keymanweb/keymanweb.js');
     
     
   • For users of non-English Wikipedia sites, copy this importScriptURI line:
                 importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Keymanweb/keymanweb.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
     
     
2. Then visit your Wikipedia monobook.js page.
   
   • For English Wikipedia users, click here.
     
   • For users of non-English Wikipedia sites, visit your monobook.js page for your language. To find the page:
     • Log into Wikipedia in your language.
     • Click your Wikipedia account name (upper right).
     • In the address bar of your web browser, add /monobook.js to the end of the web-address and click enter.
     
     For example, for Wikipedia in German I would:
     • Visit http://de.wikipedia.org and log in (upper right).
     • Click on my account name, which takes me to:
       http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Tavulteguy
     • Add /monobook.js to the web-address and click enter. This takes me to: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Tavulteguy/monobook.js


3. If you don't have a monobook.js page yet, click to create one now.
   
   
   
   
4. Paste the importScript to your monobook.js page.
   
   
   
   
5. Save the page.
   
   
   
   
6. You now have KeymanWeb installed in Wikipedia.
   To use KeymanWeb, click the KeymanWeb icon.
   
   
   
   
7. Select the traditional region for your language.
   
   
   
   
8. Select your language.
   
   
   
   
9. Start typing! You can use your computer's keyboard or the keyboard on screen. For help on your language's keyboard, click the help link under the on screen keyboard.
   
   
10. Finally, click Off on the KeymanWeb menu when you want to stop typing in your language.
    
    

How to use Sinhala in Microsoft Word

Another support incident report from Marc and Peirce...  Last week we were assisting a Sinhala user who was having trouble selecting Sinhala fonts in Microsoft Word 2003 on WIndows XP: no matter which font they chose, it would switch back to "KaputaUnicode" as soon as they started typing in Sinhala.  We started by trying to reproduce the issue here, without success.  No matter what we did, it just worked for us.

Eventually we decided to disable most of the Microsoft Office Language Settings in order to get a basic failure.  After removing all languages but English (US) and English (Australia), we were able to reproduce the problem: no matter which Sinhala font we chose, Word would switch back to KaputaUnicode.

Then we tried installing the logical language settings using the MIcrosoft Office Language Settings (MOLS) tool.  We added "Sinhalese (limited support)", Tamil and Hindi, but none of these made any apparent diference.  I stopped and tried to remember which other languages I had previously configured in the MOLS tool when things were working for us.  There were a whole lot of languages from all over the world: which one would make the difference?

I took a somewhat educated guess, and added Hebrew.  Loaded Word and tried my sample Sinhala sentence again.  Success!  It worked!  I could now choose any of the Sinhala Unicode fonts and type with them.  Would you have guessed that?

Using the Font Helper in Keyman Desktop to solve common font problems

Recently I was asked a question about Keyman involving a display issue with the Hebrew holam vowel point (U+05B9). The problem was that the holem vowel was causing too much space to appear between letters. To reproduce the scenario, I used Keyman Desktop's Font Helper and the "Getting Started" text editor on Windows XP.

Keyman Desktop's font helper identifies the fonts on your system which are compatible with the selected Keyman Desktop keyboard. It also identifies how compatible the fonts are with a percentage score.

The font helper is available within both the Getting Started editor and the On Screen Keyboard (click the button). In this situation, it was easier to use the font helper embedded within the Getting Started editor. (To access "Getting Started", select Help from the Keyman menu.)

Back to the story then. First I identified a Hebrew word which used the holam vowel point. The phrase I decided to use was "he will write" ( ). I entered that into the Getting Started editor using the Galaxie Hebrew keyboard. The Getting Started editor identified a number of fonts that appeared to be compatible (trimmed image):

I initially selected the Ezra SIL font (by clicking on the font name in the font helper) and confirmed that the holem displayed correctly:

I then selected the Times New Roman font and immediately saw the behaviour that was described:

The low score of 59% in the Font Helper for Times New Roman tells us that the font only includes just slightly more than half of the Hebrew characters accessible via the Galaxie Hebrew keyboard, whereas the Ezra SIL font (100%) includes all of them.

I was able to advise the original user that Galaxie Hebrew Unicode and Ezra SIL were good, compatible fonts for Biblical Hebrew, while (on Windows XP at least), most of the system fonts did not fully support it.

Now we have to wait and see if that resolves the problem for him!

How we integrated KeymanWeb in Wikipedia

We recently published a KeymanWeb Wikipedia Plugin to allow you to use KeymanWeb anywhere in Wikipedia -- editing pages, searching for information, or participating in discussions.  In this post, I wanted to talk about the process of integration from beginning to end.

The whole process took us about 4 hours.

1. We created a free subscription for KeymanWeb at http://www.tavultesoft.com/account/home/kmw/  We followed the steps in the subscription process, added every keyboard for every language, and added the domain "en.wikipedia.org" as the primary domain for the subscription.  (We later extended the subscription to every Wikipedia domain).
2. Next, we created a new plugin Javascript file at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keymanweb/keymanweb.js which linked to our KeymanWeb subscription and imported the KeymanWeb Javascript components as the page loaded, using the Wikipedia Monobook function addOnloadHook:

   addOnloadHook( function() {
    document.writeln("<"+"scr"+"ipt type='text/javascript' "+
    "src='http://r.keymanweb.com/code/?domain="+
    location.hostname+"&id=243&page="+
    encodeURIComponent(location.pathname)+"'>"+
    <"+"/"+"scr"+"ipt>");
    
    document.getElementById('bodyContent').innerHTML = 
    "<div id='KeymanWebControl'></div>" + 
    document.getElementById('bodyContent').innerHTML;
   } );

3. Also in the same Javascript file, we inserted an element at the top of the bodyContent as a container for the KeymanWeb toolbar:

   importStylesheetURI(
    'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title='+
    'User:Keymanweb/keymanweb.css&action=raw&'+
    'ctype=text/css' );
   

4. At this point, we had KeymanWeb working within Wikipedia, and could select a keyboard and type with it in any edit box in Wikipedia.
5. However, we decided that the normal KeymanWeb toolbar was too intrusive for Wikipedia, and replaced it with a new, smaller toolbar.  This took the most time, including drawing, scaling and modifying the CSS rules for displaying the toolbar.  We recorded our CSS changes in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keymanweb/keymanweb.css.  Firebug in Firefox was an invaluable tool for tweaking the CSS to get it just right.
6. Finally, we took some time to write up the instructions for integrating KeymanWeb into your own user profile in Wikipedia.

As you can see, the actual integration process was dead easy.  Most of the time we spent was taken on polishing the look and feel of KeymanWeb for a better fit into Wikipedia.  We were surprised ourselves by how straightforward it was to get the basic integration right.

Try it yourself at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keymanweb!

Tibetan EWTS keyboard and Sanskrit stacks (or why clear documentation is essential)

I was assisting a Tibetan user with an issue typing Sanskrit stacks today.  We were both reading the documentation for the keyboard and both running into the same problem -- we just could not get the stacks to form.  We were both running in Vista so I knew that the problem was not rendering.

We both tried to type pad<space><space>+ma<space>, which according to the documentation, as we read it, should give us པདྨ but was instead giving us པད+མ་.

So I did a little research.  I took the source file for the keyboard and searched for a couple of the stacked characters -- in this case, I searched for the Unicode character Tibetan subjoined ma (U+0FA8).  As soon as I found it in the source, I understood the problem.  The source line read:

"+m" + " " > U+0FA8

We needed to type just +m, not +ma.

Now when I go back to the documentation and read it again, it seems obvious enough.  But it clearly isn't, because three different people have read the same instructions and made the same mistake.

Now I have a new item on my list: clarify the stacking instructions in the Tibetan EWTS keyboard!

Specifying default options for Keyman Engine at install time

Note: this blog is intended for Keyman Developer Branding Pack Users.  It is not applicable for Keyman Desktop or KeymanWeb.

The default settings for Keyman Engine may not be what you want for your product.  It is possible to change the default options by adding the values to the .wxs intermediate file created by the Product Editor.  The .wxs file will then be used to compile the product installer.

1. View the knowledge base article at Tavultesoft KB article KMKB0060 and decide which settings you want to implement
2. Open the Product Editor for myproduct.kpp and click “Export to WiX” in the Compile tab.  Export the files to c:\myproduct (or replace this with your own path)
3. Load the myproduct.wxs file generated in the C:\myproduct\build folder in an XML editor.  An XML editor is recommended because otherwise it is hard to read, but can use any Unicode-compliant text editor if you prefer.
4. In the section <Component Id="component_CurrentUser", add Registry values as per the following example for "auto open osk" (available types are 'integer' or 'string'):
   <Registry Root="HKCU" Key="Software\Tavultesoft\Keyman Engine\7.0" Type="integer" Name="auto open osk" Value="0" />
6. Create a batch file with the following commands, tweaked as per your product name and choice of folders, and then run it:
   cd \myproduct\build
   "\program files\Tavultesoft\Keyman Developer 7.0\WiX\candle.exe" myproduct.wxs
   cd \myproduct
   "\program files\Tavultesoft\Keyman Developer 7.0\WiX\light.exe" -out myproduct.msi build\myproduct.wixobj "\Program Files\Tavultesoft\Keyman Developer 7.0\WiX\wixui.wixlib" -loc "\program files\Tavultesoft\ Keyman Developer 7.0\WiX\WixUI_en-us.wxl" -b "\Program Files\Tavultesoft\Keyman Developer 7.0\Redist\Desktop"

   EDIT 11/11/09: Fixed incorrect directory for light.exe command -- thanks Amaryllis for pointing this out.

7. This will generate a myproduct.msi file with the options preset as you desire.

If you want to make a new version of the installer, I recommend that you start from Step 2 again as Keyman Developer will manage the upgrade of the .wxs file, which needs a number of changes to make it work correctly for an upgrade.  So make sure you save a copy of the <Registry> XML tags that you add, so you can paste them into the updated .wxs file in this situation.

We plan to add a RegistryKeys section to the .kpp file in a future update of Keyman Developer to reduce the complexity of this process.

Creating a custom On Screen Keyboard for Keyman Desktop

A discussion with a customer a few days ago led into this blog post - how to create your own On Screen Keyboard for Keyman Desktop that does not need to follow the standard 101-key keyboard shape. Your custom on-screen keyboard will be a HTML file that includes a couple of interoperability tweaks to integrate cleanly into the Keyman Desktop On Screen Keyboard UI.  Once you have created your Keyman Desktop keyboard and package (see the tutorials for info on how to do this!), you will need to create a new HTML file called "usage.htm". The basic idea is simple: clicking on an element in the HTML page will fire an event back to Keyman telling it to insert a specific character into the active document.  For example, the following snippet will insert the ṡ character when clicked:<a href='keyman:insertchars?chars=U+1E61'>Insert ṡ</a> Note the different elements of the URL:

• keyman:insertchars tells Keyman to insert characters
• chars=U+1E61 tells Keyman which Unicode characters to insert

This is really all you need to know to start creating your own customised On Screen Keyboard.  Keyman will manage the focus, context and interactions with the target application. For a complete example, we'll look at the European Latin keyboard.  Feel free to use it as a starting point for your keyboard.  Note that the usage.htm is targeted at Internet Explorer, as we know that it will be used only by the embedded Internet Explorer web browser in the On Screen Keyboard.  This means that cross-browser compatibility has not been added to the file, for simplicity.

The European Latin usage.htm has the following components:

• An embedded stylesheet
• Javascript to generate the grid of characters (simpler to maintain than storing it as HTML) - the "gen" function
• Javascript to handle resizing the grid of characters to the window size, automatically - the doResize function
• A small amount of Javascript to handle customised tooltips for the character grid - the mouseOverBox function
• And a couple of utility functions

The body of the document is straightforward - just call the gen() function to complete.

Download Usage.

Internet Explorer embedded fonts vulnerability and patch

Microsoft have just announced a set of vulnerabilities with their Embedded OpenType Font component.  This component is used in Internet Explorer to automatically download and display fonts on websites.  it is especially useful for displaying text in languages not supported by your operating system.

Tavultesoft use the Embedded OpenType Font component in a number of our websites.  For example, we use it on http://ethiopic.keymankeyboards.com/ to instantly allow display and editing of Amharic, Tigrigna and other Ethiopic languages.

FireFox 3.5, Safari, and Chrome should not be affected by this vulnerability, and you should be able to utilise embedded fonts in these browsers safely.

Make sure you use Windows Update as soon as possible to update your computer to avoid being affected by this vulnerability!