by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/07/20 13:56 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/07/20/8770668856267196753.aspx
pardon the Germanesque title
For previous parts of this series a search on the keywords
should prove useful. But for the real inspiration behind today's blog post, you may want to look another one.
It's kinda funny, but this series of blog posts was pretty much a collection of the various facets of my vision of MSKLC, the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator. That approach made me resist adding this final piece of the puzzle since the ideas in it came up in a Q&A after my IUC talk The Story of MSKLC and some subsequent emails.
However, the nature of keeping the vision specifically Microsoft internal kinda ignores the open source/open sources idea, so I decided to rethink this plan a bit....
The inspiration for the final blog post in the series is
Could MSKLC build keyboards for other platforms?
The premise has several important facets to it:
• the CLDR has within it a process designed to convert the keyboard layout source of many different platforms and specifically either to or from the.KLC format used by MSKLC;
• the various platforms, while each having different features and limitations, are each capable of expressing the majority of the same basic keyboard layouts;
• MSKLC, for whatever limitations it may have, is at least acknowledged (sometimes begrudgingly!) to be superior to the other user interfaces for keyboard layout authoring;
• given all of this, using MSKLC to author keyboard layouts just makes good sense in general.
Now I did present this specific idea both before and after Microsoft started getting all open source-y, and people were openly skeptical about adding such a functionality to MSKLC itself to compile the binaries for other platforms (a point on which I do agree), and most were openly skeptical about even trying to spit out the CLDR generated source for other platforms (a point on which I not agree!).
But in true Glinda the Good Witch/Wizard of Oz movie fashion
you the keyboard layout author has and will continue to have the power to do that right now. Just use either MSKLC and the CLDR to author keyboard layouts for other platforms OR use the CLDR to create.KLC source files for MSKLC -- whichever makes the most sense for your particular scenario!