Topic creating new keyboard with non-US English keyboard

Hi,

I have a question about creating new keyboards for minority languages that only need one or two different character changes. I have scoured the documentation and tried all sorts of things, but I'm surprised to find out that in order to create a positional keyboard, the only option is to start with the US English keyboard. This would mean re-creating (for example) the whole Russian keyboard only to make 1 change.

I hope I'm wrong and have overlooked something. I've looked into creating a mnemonic keyboard, but I run into the same problem.

In the documentation (http://help.keyman.com/developer/language/reference/mnemoniclayout) I see this suggestion "If you are creating a positional keyboard, and you do not use a US English layout normally, we suggest you install another language in Control Panel and assign the US English layout to it, so that you can easily switch to it to write your keyboard." I don't understand what it means by "assign the US English layout to it". I don't see any option to do that in Windows 10 which I'm using.

Also, I noticed the option to change the base layout - this could potentially work, but I don't see Russian listed. I see Bulgarian but not Russian.

Anyway, I hope that you understand my question. I just need to ability to start with a keyboard other than the US English keyboard to create slight modifications.

I suppose my alternative is to use MSKLC which offers this feature of using any standard Windows keyboard layout to start with.

Thanks!

Lang Tech

Yes, currently positional layouts default to US English if no override is specified, and mnemonic layouts are designed to work only with Latin script base keyboards, as this use case has been the most common one.

This is a gap in the feature set of Keyman, but it isn't trivial to solve. The recommended solution at present is to work from the base standard Russian keyboard as a .kmn. We have over 100 different base keyboards available internally at present and they can be requested via email to [email protected]. In the future they should be available open source.