Custom keyboard, custom language?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/11/28 03:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/11/28/497320.aspx

Madhava Tennakoon asked me:

I am a developper of fonts for Sinhala/Sinhalese Language - Sri Lanka. Those days we developped fonts for Sri Lankan Standerd like ANSI (256 Chrs). After the Unicode standerd came now there is a page for Sinhala(Sinhalese) U+0D80. So I Developped new font using that page and glips.

Then there is a problum. Microsoft deos not have keyboard for Sri Lankan Sinhala Language.

So I downloaded the program named Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC.EXE) and tried to create a Sinhala Keyboard Layout. In This case I can develop a keyboard but in that pakage asks for a "Language" in its properties dialog. But .. It (Microsoft) Deos note have a language as Sinhala or Sinhalese for Our Language.... and it has a LCID for Sinhalese but there is no way to use that.

Please help me to solve this problum.
If there is a place to download our language from somewere or....
If there is a way to create a new language.

Please help me....

Thanks.

Madhava Tennakoon
Sri Lanka

This hits on the biggest limitation that exists for MSKLC: the fact that it is limited to the list of locales that shipped with the 1.1 version of the .NET Framework.

There are at least four things that make this worse:

The expanded list of languages in ELK v.1 and ELK v.2
The Sinhalese language enabling work done after the Tsunami (which also gave it an LCID -- 0x045b)
The even more expanded list of languages that will be happening in Vista
Custom culture support in the .NET Framework 2.0

Now one thing I will mention is that it is one of the most requested items on the feature list for the next version of MSKLC.

In the meantime, the list of languages is static, even though you can cover any language you want with the keyboard itself.

Slightly embarrassing given the fact that I not only developed MSKLC but was involved to some extent with every one of those bulleted items above. Kind of like engineering to make myself look foolish? :-)

Sorry about that, and it will get better next time around....

This post brought to you by "ඈ" (U+0d88, a.k.a. SINHALA LETTER AEEYANNA)

# Andrew Cunningham on 28 Nov 2005 4:21 PM:

What would be involved in developing an ELK? I'm interested in the posisbility of enabling a number of African languages.

Andrew

# Michael S. Kaplan on 28 Nov 2005 6:51 PM:

Hi Andrew,

See http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/476317.aspx for more info on that....

# Jim Lyon on 30 Nov 2005 1:34 PM:

So what does a Sinhala Letter Aeeyanna look like, anyway? Your reference doesn't have a picture of it.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 30 Nov 2005 4:51 PM:

Ah, for that I think would need to look into getting on the Vista beta. :-)

# Nick Lamb on 2 Dec 2005 4:43 AM:

" So what does a Sinhala Letter Aeeyanna look like, anyway? Your reference doesn't have a picture of it."

Just drop a suitable Sinhala TTG (try Google) into your font folder and refresh the page. At least that's how it should work, the request for character U+0d88 should fall through the preferred typeface and get caught by the Sinhala font because it has a mapping for the U+0d88 glyph.

Works here but I to restart my browser.

Alternatively visit Unicode.org

# Seth on 30 Jan 2006 1:32 PM:

Could you tell me where is the "Sinhalese Enabling Pack" ? It disappears from Microsoft's GlobalDev web site.

# Michael S. Kaplan on 30 Jan 2006 2:17 PM:

Nick -- or just run Vista -- the font is in the beta! :-)
Seth -- I'm not sure if it was actually up there for sure....

Please consider a donation to keep this archive running, maintained and free of advertising.
Donate €20 or more to receive an offline copy of the whole archive including all images.

referenced by

2008/06/21 Back to Sri Lanka (conceptually)

2006/09/13 MSKLC and Vista? MSKLC and 64-bit? Darn, we're 0 for 2....

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day