Keyboard Mapping

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1

Hi All

I am creating a new font, But the language have more characters than the normal keyboard. I am using Font creator professional edition.

I have done keyboard mapping for the normal characters By right click > Properties > Mapping

Now i have few characters left which i would like to map using ALT + W + W

I am using font platforms

Macintosh Roman
Microsoft unicode BMP Only
Unicode 2.0 and onwards, BMP

Can someone guide me how to do the keyboard mapping

Thanks & Regards
Fairy

2

You can create custom keyboard layouts using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator program - for free! Just search for it … anywhere, really. You will be able to define your layout, test it, and then create the DLLs and setup program, all in one program.

MSKLC lets you define dead keys - a key that will only output its “normal” character if the next key pressed doesn’t make a special combination. For example, my default keyboard is the US-International keyboard. When I type a quotation mark, the computer does not actually output the quotation mark until I’ve pressed another key, because if I type a vowel or “y”, it will give me a precomposed letter + diaeresis, ie, "q "w ë "r "t ÿ ü ï ö "p, ä "s "d "f &c. It doesn’t usually get in the way, but every once in a while, I have to change a quotation starting with the indefinite article a tweak: Ä to "A, by typing quote + space + A.

I have also defined a REALLY international keyboard that defines some dead keys on the upper right of the keyboard as selecting a foreign script, e.g. "" = greek: θωερτψυιοπ, ασδφγηςκλ, and ζχξϝβνμ̀; “]” = cyrillic: щшертчуиопъыь, асдфгйжкля, and зхцвбнмэҩє; “}” = hebrew; “|” = devanagari; AltGr (right Alt or Ctrl+Alt) + “]” = cherokee; AltGr + "" = arabic; “=” = hiragana, “+” = katakana. I also have the shift + number symbols as dead keys, which select IPA and some odd diacritics. My braille layout is AltGr + “q w e r a s d f” for each half of the sign, with the shift key for the bottom dot. All these keys have a normal semantic, with my AltGr keys as ƣƿə®þʊȣɩœ¶, æßðȝɣƕʒĸƛ, and ɂʃ¢ʌƅŋµ. I figure that I have used up about 1700 of the dead key combinations, out of a possible 35k using only shift, AltGr, and Shift+AltGr.

A couple of notes: with MSKLC you have to define a default character for a given key in order to define dead key combinations for that key. You will get a warning that your dead key combinations should have space returning the default character, but I find that I want my punctuation-marks-as-dead-keys to interpret a following space as an actual space, and you can choose to ignore that particular warning. The characters accessed by dead keys must be a single UTF-16 code point, so if a particular language has an “H” with acute, along with its vowels, the vowels can be accessed as the single characters á,é,í,ó,&ú with the dead key acute + a, e, i, o, u, but the h́ will have to be an “h” followed by a combining acute, which I have defined as apostrophe + shift-space. This also means that characters outside the Unicode BMP cannot be accessed by dead key.

All this is to say that there is a simple program that enables you to do exactly what you want, provided you and your audience are running windows.

3

It is best to avoid Alt key mappings — they are reserved to access menus in applications, so if you map Alt W to type a character it will no longer pull down the Window menu.

Use dead keys as suggested, or Ctrl + Alt + W

I have created my own keyboard using MS Keyboard Layout Creator. Its not difficult.

Here is a full list of keyboard mappings

4

I forgot to mention that particular bit. For example, I am unable to directly type “ɣ”, the lower case latin gamma (AltGr + g), into the forum because Alt+g shifts the cursor to the google taskbar on my browser. Defining AltGr combinations will occasionally lead to these kinds of conflicts, and you will have to test and decide whether the conflicts are too disruptive for your particular needs.

Use dead keys as suggested, or Ctrl + Alt + W

Which doesn’t always work, either. It is definitely a bit of a shot-in-the-dark whether a particular keystroke will lead to a macro conflict in one of your programs. You just gotta experiment.

5

Hi Bhikkhu Pesala, MSKLC is a fantastic tool , I was able to give the layout. But i have one doubt i will explain you what i am trying to acheive.

  1. I have a post script font, I have to change to TTF (DONE USING ONLINE TOOL http://www.fontconverter.org/)
  2. While converting to TTF i am loosing the keyboard layout of font ( HERE IS WHERE I USED FONT CREATOR TO ASSIGN KEYBOARD BACK)
  3. I have to assign multiple characters ( DONE WITH BOTH REPLIES OF YOURS & MSKLC)

Now i have to change the font to EOT, why i need is i am creating a content management system. there will be data from Pagemaker, Photoshop & MS Word. so if i create it as EOT it will be easy for data entry operators to copy and paste in WYSIWYG editor rather than typing entire content again.

So will it be possible if i create using MSKLC i can change to EOT. Advice me if i am wrong

Kind regards
Fairy

6

Thank you vanisaac for the reply it helped me a lot and Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator program is a good one. Yes me and my audience is using windows. Please check my other reply and drop me your valuable suggestions.

Thank you once again

Kind regards
Fairy