by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/10/25 10:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/10/25/5660239.aspx
Over in the Suggestion Box, Chris Ross asks:
Well, at least he noticed it was a dirty registry hack! :-)
But in any case, Chris is right; the "hack" involving changing the registry that I talked about in Not all keyboards are included in MSKLC's lists (which also works in NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003, by the way), has been mostly removed as all of IMEs were moved to the Text Services Framework and the entries under that registry subkey that acted ah shortcuts to the IMEs via LoadKeyboardLayout were removed.
In fact, the only way to get such entries in Vista is when you install Office, which even in Office 2007 adds some entries for updated IMEs that they include.
If any of this sounds vaguely familiar, you may be recalling recent post Cutting the cord while someone else is shoring it up which talks about the Office thing a bit!
But in any case, ding dong the hack is gone -- a part of the cord cutting that is not as genuinely painful as the LoadKeyboardLayout issue since it is not documented as being a way to do things, and as with scan code map change, affects the entire machine (or at least anyone using the IMEs in question).
I can't claim to be all that happy about the change, but it is what it is. Sorry, Chris. :-(
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# Chris on 26 Oct 2007 3:50 AM:
Thanks for the quick response!
At the moment I'm using scan code maps to convert the system to Dvorak, and then using a custom layout I made in the MKLC to convert keystrokes back to QWERTY--making that was fun. That way I can still have a user account that defaults to QWERTY for the unenlightened, but I can type English or Japanese in Dvorak. However, nobody can type Japanese in QWERTY.
The only way I've found to let people use Japanese or English in Dvorak or QWERTY is to use a program called AutoHotKey instead of scan code maps. But it seemed like overkill and sometimes took too long to load after booting up.
I probably don't know what I'm talking about, but it seems like it would be relatively painless to just let users choose a layout/IME pair instead of having each IME use a pre-determined layout.
referenced by
2008/02/22 What's missing from the model
You explained a rather dirty registry hack to allow people to use an IME with another keyboard layout (IE Dvorak) in this article:
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/04/16/408853.aspx
I assume that applied to WinXP only (I couldn't find any IME registry keys under Keyboard Layouts in Vista, only the basic "Japanese" one).
Is there any way short of using scan code maps to allow me to use Dvorak with the Japanese IME? I don't want to use scan code maps ( http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/input/w2kscan-map.mspx ) because they apply to all users. My Japanese roommate can't type in Dvorak.