Font Forum

Microsoft has a new tool the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.

Features:
- Create new keyboard layouts from scratch
- Base a new layout on an existing one
- Modify an existing keyboard layout and build a new layout from it
- Multilingual input locales within edit control fields.
- Package the resulting keyboard layouts for subsequent delivery and installation.

To install and use the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator tool, your system must meet the following requirements:

- Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003 (MSKLC will not run on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME or Windows NT4).
- Microsoft .NET Framework v1.0 or v1.1 must be installed. If you have not already installed one of these versions of the .NET Framework, you can do so from the following URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/defau ... mework.asp

This looks like a great tool. Unfortunately the resulting KBD*.DLL files don't work properly, especially the Dead Key feature, as I found out after spending a couple of hours on creating a polytonic Greek keyboard.

I haven't used the tool yet, however I wasn't expecting this kind of result.

I have used this free tool to create several Keyboards for Pāli. I didn't run into any problems. My keyboards use several different dead keys, as well as AltGr and AltGr Shift. I switch keyboards only when I need to type extended characters such as ā ī ū ñ.

I have also used the keyboard creator successfully, including dead keys.

My critical remarks made nearly four years (!) ago prove to be not completely correct. I later found out that the problems I mentioned are limited to the & key (Shift+7). People at Microsoft have confirmed this bug. This bug does NOT show up when testing the keyboard in MSKLC, which is most annoying. So if you stay away from the & key the program works fine.

Thanks all for the updates!

I just found out Microsoft has released a new version of its Keyboard Layout Creator, which is Vista compatible. It can be found at the link in the first post of this thread. The new version also runs on previous versions of Windows, but in that case not all new features are available. I'm happy to report that the bug I mentioned earlier has been removed. The new version also makes it much easier to install newly created keyboard files: it creates a little setup.exe which you run to install, remove or repair the associated keyboard. Great tool!

I installed version 1.4 of the keyboard layout creator. I could open it, but the working space is empty and white. I have no idea what is wrong with this program on Vista and an Toshiba noetebook.


Ich habe die Version 1.4 installiert, der Keyboardcreator öffnet sich auch, aber die Arbeitsfläche bleibt leer. Auf XP ging die vorige Version einwandfrei.

Ich habe keine Ahnung, warum das mit Vista auf einem Toshiba-Notebook nicht funktioniert.

Hutschi wrote:I installed version 1.4 of the keyboard layout creator. I could open it, but the working space is empty and white. I have no idea what is wrong with this program on Vista and an Toshiba noetebook.

It is normal to see a blank white keyboard. Try loading an existing keyboard from the File menu.

I've run into problems using Keyboard Layout Creator. When I first design a keyboard, everything works fine. But when I want to modify that keyboard later problems arise. I uninstall the keyboard, delete all the files and folders, but whenever I try to reinstall the modified keyboard it does crazy things like installing a previous version or not allowing the new name (even after deleting and uninstalling the old name). I've even had a different keyboard (with different name) installed instead of the modified keyboard. Any suggestions?