asar wrote:Afternoon Vanisaac and thank you very much for the reply. I have to study what you wrote. Fyi, I am not a programmer and I quite dont understand these things:
1- "is to define the characters in the two SG Caps states": what do you mean by SG Caps states?
2- what the Inuktitut-Naqittaut keyboard is all about? I browsed in the Internet, I found (
http://www.tavultesoft.com/kb/?id=41. 22/4/2011) a lot of new things for me at there and there are too many articles to be read. I am using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) and the one you propose to me is a different thing - I afraid it does not compatible with some Windows applications. Anyway, this need me to further my study about it. So could you tell me, based on your experience: which one is the better: MSKLC or this? fyi, I am using Windows XP and Windows 7 (2 laptops: my office laptop is XP and mine one is Windows7).
3- "Remember that SG Caps and deadkey combinations do not accept multi-code point characters, including those found outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, and letters plus combining diacritics." I dont quite clear about this... again SG Caps, I also dont understand about the deadkeys combinations, multi-code point characters, basic multilingual plane? anyway, "letters plus combining diacritics": do you mean dz with macron above them, is one of the letters?
Ok, very sorry my friend. I am quite slow: I spent about 1 year and 3 months (part-time base only since I have to focus on my work) to study about Font Creator and MSKLC. This new thing requires time.
First off, EVERYTHING I wrote about in the last message is found in MSKLC. Don't look for it anywhere else, including on the internet, and especially not on Keyman.
SG Caps: Normally, when you press the Caps Lock key, it acts as if you are holding down the shift key. SG Caps - named for the Swiss German layout - allows you to define a whole other set of characters to the Caps Lock and Caps Lock + Shift keys.
I'm going to take you through this step by step here: 1) open MSKLC and load the Inuktitut-Naqittaut layout under File:Load an Existing Keyboard. 2) select the Show the Caps Lock checkbox in the upper left corner. You should see a whole set of Canadian Syllabics. (see the first picture, below) This is the SG Caps shift state, and it is completely different than when you press shift, which you can see by deselecting Caps Lock, and selecting the Shift checkbox - syllabics vs. capital letters, see? 3) reselecting Caps Lock, click on the close bracket key that is colored differently on the right side of the third row. Click on the "..." next to the Dead Key? checkbox that is filled in. This is the list of characters that will appear if you first press the bracket key, then any of the syllabic characters (pic 2) This is what is meant by a "dead key". It is dead because when you hit the bracket key, it doesn't immediately type a character, but waits to see if you are going to press one of the keys (the base) that makes a different character in combination (the composite). The great thing about this particular layout is that those dotted forms that are accessed by the bracket dead key are also defined as the AltGr shift state, so you can use either method (AltGr ignores the Caps Lock state), typing the same base key to get the dotted form of that character.
The Basic Multilingual Plane is the Unicode code points from U+0000..U+FFFF. This contains nearly every character used to write a currently spoken language, except for a few Chinese name characters. The Supplementary Multilingual Plane, code points U+10000..U+1FFFF, contains historical alphabets, special bold/italic/script/blackletter characters needed to correctly encode mathematical and scientific notation standards, notational conventions, and other rarely used scripts like Deseret, Egyptian Heiroglyphics, Cuneiform, Linear B, musical notation, Mah Jongg tiles, etc. The Secondary Ideographic Plane, U+20000..U+2FFFF, contains Chinese characters that are not used to write modern Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, or Japanese, and some names characters.
Only the characters found U+0000..U+FFFF can be accessed by dead key or in the SG Caps shift state. By multi-code point, I mean any character that cannot be expressed as a single Unicode code point. If you haven't already, download the Unicode 6.0 code charts (75 MB!) at
http://www.unicode.org/Public/6.0.0/cha ... Charts.pdf , and you can see what constitutes a single code point. If you can't find your character in a single box, but have to compose it with two or more characters, like dz̄dz̄dz̄dz̄d͞z macron, then you cannot specify that as the composite (result) of a dead key, nor as a character in one of the SG Caps shift states.
A couple notes about navigating in MSKLC. First, you won't see the SG Caps state when you click on a key unless you select the advanced view. Same with the dead key options. This should get you started, but remember, you can always look at any of the crazy keyboards out there by going to File:Load and Existing Keyboard, and selecting your option. Chinese keyboards can't be made this way, so you won't see some of the really nutty stuff unless you start getting into the Table Text Service ( a word of advice, don't ever look into the Table Text Service. It's horrible. )
Lastly, I am not a programmer, either. I studied languages and the ancient world at university. We all have to learn this stuff on our own, and it just comes from curiosity and perseverance.
-Van