To get Korean wrong you have to SHIFT things a bit...

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/06/05 18:35 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/06/05/10171473.aspx


No, this blog is not a political statement about policies of Kim Jong-il or the DPRK or the next ruler. It is technical blog about a keyboard....

It started not long after the Keyboard Layouts, everywhere! blog I wrote.

The one that pointed out the revamped site showing all the Windows keyboard layouts, which in this new incarnation would support not only Internet Explorer, but now also FireFox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome.

You can call it

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb964651

Or you can call it

http://msdn.microsoft.com/bb964651.aspx

Or you can even call it

http://msdn.com/bb964651.aspx

They all resolve to that same site.

Shortly after that blog, in The key KEY perspective is that 'Perspective is Key', I discussed an issue in the Japanese and Korean layouts on that site that is an intentional choice, but one that some might consider to be unintuitive or even a bug.

In the process of that, a bigger issue which one could much more defensibly consider a bug was being ignored.

It can be found in the Korean keyboard layout. Not in the base state of either the ENG or KOR modes:

  

both of which rermain bug free. Instead if you look at the SHIFT mode on both you'll see some problems:

   

Now there are two problems here.

Did you spot them both?

They are:

You can look at this picture for a more obvious highlighting of the problems (the first problem in red, the second in green):

Luckily the soft keyboard built into the IME does it all correctly, though:

Now I guess the idea of only showing the "doubled' Jamo (I talked about the doubled Jamo previously in Ssang Your Life (or alternately: I'd Like To Teach the World To Ssang)) was intended as a way to emphasize them via contrast, but honestly it would probably be better to be accurate here....

As for the reversed parentheses, that's simply a straight bug without even a weak justification....

It looks a little like something else that isn't as much of a bug though it is a little bit of one that I'll talk about another day; but THIS is definitely just a bug.

These bugs should definitely be looked into, though -- being correct is so much better for everyone!


Mihai on 8 Jun 2011 4:58 PM:

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But now it is so outdated that I am not sure about usefulness.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 :-)

Michael S. Kaplan on 8 Jun 2011 8:02 PM:

Well it is behind by a few keyboards....probably 100 or so (like 40 new ones since XP SP 2 and the rest small additions). I guess that might be something to fix here, huh? :-)

Mihai on 9 Jun 2011 11:38 AM:

> I guess that might be something to fix here, huh? :-)

It should not matter if it is 100 or 1000, I can imagine a solution to deal with that, and working forever (more or less).

One can write a .NET application to generate the keyboard layouts based on the current system. Might need some native calls, and big chunks might be reused from MSKLC.

Then make sure that the server has all the keyboards installed (which it does, I assume nobody deletes the keyboard layout files :-) and you are always up to date.

Alternatively, have the app written in "no matter what language" and generate data files and images to be consumed by the current site.

Probably something that can really use MSKLC as is (with some automation and screen captures).

Probably even less work to implement, does not have the quality requirements of something running on a public server, and easier to get the latest keyboards.

But one would have to run it once in a while and push out new data files.

Work? Yes, but smarter than editing files in Photoshop and editing keyboards

(I see no other explanation for the 4 different fonts in the Romanian keyboard :-)


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referenced by

2011/07/20 We got the keyboards now! (Windows 7 edition)

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