William wrote:ulaping wrote:And I don't think I'm wasting everyone's time.
I have not been able to answer your questions because I do not have experience with the Microsoft Keyboard Layout system.
On top of that I do not have any great knowledge of the Devanagari script.
It seems to me that an approach would be to try to break the learning process into smaller steps.
So, here is a question: could people who are experts possibly have a look at this question please, either to answer it or to say that the question is not the right question to ask?
Crappola. I think that's me.
Ok, first things first. One: you cannot map a font to a keyboard. This is a concept that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Keyboards can only be defined to type a code point. This is a very important concept to learn, so pay attention, ulaping. EVERYTHING is held together by code points. Think of a code point as a number that we have decided means a certain thing, like "Devanagari letter Ka". A keyboard can ONLY define a keystroke to a code point - not a character, not a font, nothing but a number. The set of numbers that correspond in a modern computer to a given character is called the Unicode standard, and it assigns the hexidecimal (base 16) numbers 0900-097F to the standard letters of the Devanagari script, not including special characters needed for vedic texts.
Now this is the most important part. Because keyboards can only reference these numbers, a font has to assign its characters the same set of numbers in order for it to be used. As I said above, those numbers can be found in the Unicode Standard, and William provided the links to the Devanagari ranges in Unicode, above. So you need to go into your font, and for EVERY CHARACTER, figure out which code point (that's the little numbers under each character in the Unicode table, or on the left of the character list) corresponds to a given character in your font. Then go to your font, right click on that character (let's try Devanagari Ka for this example), select the Mappings tab, select the "Microsoft Unicode BMP only" platform, and then enter that number (0915), preceded by a '$' (ie '$0915'), and click Add. You should see that the character is now assigned to DEVANAGARI LETTER KA. Do this for
EVERY CHARACTER IN YOUR FONT! - find it in the Unicode table or character list, right click the character in FCP, and add the mapping (code point) for that character in the Unicode BMP platform.
Now on to the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). You probably don't have to do anything with this because the Devanagari INSCRIPT keyboard is already on your computer! You just need to install it in the Regional Language and Options Control Panel. If, by some combination of misfortune, you have code points that aren't in the INSCRIPT layout, then you will need to load the existing INSCRIPT keyboard in MSKLC, and then click on an empty key (check some of the checkboxes - not Ctrl - if you can't find any that are free), then enter the code point preceded by 'U+' or 'u+'. Note that the U+ designation for Unicode code points is considered standard, but FCP has to enable mappings to non-Unicode standards as well, so it falls back to the simple '$'. Please please please read all the documentation for MSKLC before you try to use your new keyboard, because you need to know about how to name and install layouts, and I'm kind of a hack at that particular part.
Once you've assigned the code points to the characters in your font and installed, the Devanagari keyboards will be able to type all of the letters that they can type and that are found in your font.
Most importantly, please read VERY CAREFULLY, the part about code points, because it is literally the missing link in your questions. Nothing works without a number attached to it. Not the characters in your font, not the keys on your keyboard. They are all held together by the code points that are defined in the Unicode Standard, and I would suggest that you read
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.0.0/ch01.pdf to get an overview of how these numbers are the backbone of everything.
-Van
