by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/07/20 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/07/20/10188086.aspx
Remember To get Korean wrong you have to SHIFT things a bit... from early last month?
In it I talked about a couple of longstanding bugs in the Windows "GoGlobal" Keyboard Layouts site's layout for Korean.
Now in a comment, longtime friend and regular reader Mihai said:
That web page (with keyboard layouts) used to be handy, sometimes.
But now it is so outdated that I am not sure about usefulness.
For instance there is only Romanian instance (while there are 3 of the them now: Standard, Legacy, and Programmers).
And that instance is ugly (3, if not 4 different fonts) and wrong (showing the cedilla forms for s and t (U+015F and U+0163)). Unless that is the "Legacy" layout, in which case is not wrong, just outdated :-)
I did respond to him.
Well, kind of.
The thing I didn't say was that there was already a project that was nearly complete to build those layouts!
Anyway, after a brief delay to get it all done and tested and files uploaded, the keyboard layouts are updated!
Of course the Korean was fixed, too.
And also all the other keyboard layouts included in Windows 7, ready for people to look at!
I suppose I could have skipped the earlier blog on the Korean bug, but the Korean layout wasn't fixed via the tool so it seemed like a shame to bury info about the bug. We were fixing the site anyway!
Now as a bonus I think a bunch of other problems (like one Mihai mentioned about different fonts used in the same keyboard for Romanian) also got fixed; I'm sure Mihai will let me know if there is still a problem....
And if anyone notices any bugs or problems they should feel free to let me know.
We got the keyboards now! On the Windows "GoGlobal" Keyboard Layouts site!
To close this Blog, I'll tell you two stories that are both entirely true but that if I were slightly smarter I probably wouldn't tell....
But through it all, I have to be me!
story #1: If you go back many years, the site's keyboards were originally built by a tool that K.D. Chang of the Typography team put together. However, K.D. left under somewhat mysterious circumstances that did involve his entire share of useful tools on the Sparrow server being [in retrospect not so] mysteriously deleted, a fact not realized until long after it was too late to get the share contents from a backup.
Oh well, I guess you could say something may not have been on good terms. Just a guess, no one ever told me anything on the record....
Getting it back is a good thing!
story #2: while this work was not done due to a single comment in a blog leading to my boss's boss's boss approving a bunch of funds, I was easily able to convince my boss's boss's boss to approve the project, right in the tail end of getting approval in a big room for a totally different project for an internal website.
I've love to take credit for it, but the only impressive thing I did was point out a need at the right time, shortly after a colleague and I made the need to do some other work really obvious. If it is all about timing than we were spot on. Zuzka rocks!
But obviously I shouldn't get too carried away here -- it's not like I was given a long-term staff or an annual budget line item or anything.
Either way, it was really cool to get it approved in April but even cooler to see it done on the public site in July, just a few months after the tool creating them was approved.
But in any case, we're all set now and up to date. And we can easily make updates and fixes and additions any time it would be appropriate.
I'm loving this. :-)
Santhosh Pillai on 20 Jul 2011 9:58 AM:
How to get atomic chillus in Malayalam keyboard layout?
Alan McF on 21 Jul 2011 2:56 AM:
Don't know if you're the right person to tell about this... :-)
There's a wee mistake in the USA keyboard html. Edit as:
vi kbdus.html
s/Bulgarian (Latin) Keyboard/USA Keyboard/g
The Bulgarian name appears in the page title and in a description meta.
Alan
Cristian on 21 Jul 2011 9:41 AM:
Romanian Programmers and Romanian Standard have two dead keys marked as not dead keys, namely:
* U+005e Circumflex Accent
* U+0060 Grave Accent
See www.secarica.ro/.../sr_13392_2004_08_03.pdf for reference.
Michael S. Kaplan on 21 Jul 2011 10:07 AM:
The keyboards themselves have them, which you yourself have verified previously -- it is just the images on the web. If I had to guess, I'd say the tool has trouble when you have characters that are on the keyboard TWICE -- once as dead keys, once not. Personally I consider such keyboards and standards to have a flaw in them, themselves. :-)
But I'll look into this....
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