Could MSKLC build keyboards for other platforms?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/10/28 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/10/28/10459363.aspx


After I did my presentation at the 37th Internationalization and Unicode Conference The Story of MSKLC, Raymond Wainman (who was at the presentation) sent me an email:

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the talk this morning on MSKLC!

Last year I worked on the CLDR Keyboard specification which aimed to create an XML format that could be used to represent keyboard layouts on all platforms. I wrote some tools that imported the various source formats (Windows, OSX, Android and ChromeOS) and converted them to this XML format. These XML keyboards are freely available within CLDR.

Just thought it might be interesting for you if you didn't know about it already :)

Thanks again!
Ray

Wow! I had never seriously considered MSKLC building keyboards for other platforms.

But it seems like Ray is saying that he can take a .KLC file and convert it to the format used by OSX, Android and ChromeOS.

Similarly, it sounds like it can take one of the files from OSX, Android or ChromeOS and make a .KLC file from it.

If all of that is true, then that means there is theoretically a way to make MSKLC an editor for any of these platforms!

I admit there are many things to check out first.

But if this pans out, I may have to ask my manager and LCA about our thoughts about the CLDR, if you know what I mean... 😏😊

Anonymous on 28 Oct 2013 8:17 AM:

That would be pretty cool!

Michael S. Kaplan on 28 Oct 2013 5:02 PM:

I wish some people had commented!

cheong00 on 28 Oct 2013 7:17 PM:

Talking about keyboard for other platforms, I'm still waiting for ways of creating keyboard for Windows Phone ourselves.

Some of our App writers had began to provide screen keyboard for "Quick IME" themselves. However because the character ordering (and code page coverage, because some try to support Simplified Chinese as well) is not the same, without a standard character selection sequence, for an IME that heavily relies on character selection, it's kind of pain to be used.

Andrew_Cunningham on 28 Oct 2013 7:28 PM:

Michael wrote: I wish some people had commented!

So impatient Michael, some of us have to get our brains into gear first after sufficient caffeine intake.

Some of the crew at Adobe created a python script at github.com/.../keyboard-layouts to convert from MacOS style .keylayout files to .klc files for MSKLC

Marc Durdin wrote a tool to convert an installed windows keyboard layout to a kmn source file for Keyman Developer

The are a few other scripts floating around that I have occasionally seen.

Internally for our projects we start with Keyman ... convert kmn files to .km2 files

Then use the xml representation of the Keyman virtual keyboard to create a simplified layout, and are working on xslt files to convert to .klc, .keylayout, xkb files and layouts for other input frameworks.

At least that is the plan.


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referenced by

2015/07/20 Updating MSKLC (part 9) for the sake of wondering if MSKLC + CLDR == keyboards Über Alles?

2013/11/07 MSKLC wonderings

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