Part of Nobumi Iyanaga's website. n-iyanag@ppp.bekkoame.ne.jp. 2/20/04.

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AsianExtended keylayout

AsianExtended keylayout

ReadMe

with ( NEW) Asian Extended US and Asian Extended UK
Uploaded Fri, Feb 20, 2004.

As Mac OS X.2 supports fully Unicode, and as its Unicode keyboard layouts can be generated with XML formatted files, I created a new Unicode keyboard layout for inputting transliterated East Asian text in Unicode. With this layout, I think it will be easy to type Japanese, Chinese or Sanskrit (non Vedic) transliterated text with appropriate diacritical marks (it can be used perhaps for Korean and Tibetan text also, but as I don't know these languages, I am not sure).

Here are some of the diacritical characters that will be easy to type:

These are only some examples; many other, less common, diacritical characters can be typed easily, for example:
Ă Ĭ Ŭ Ĕ Ŏ ă ĭ ŭ ĕ ŏ
A̯ I̯ U̯ E̯ O̯

a̯ i̯ u̯ e̯ o̯
r̥ R̥r̥̄ R̥̄

m̐ M̐
ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ


etc.

Contents of the Package:

This package contains:
Please download the package (48 KB to download) here

NEW (Feb. 2004): Kino-san made two new keyboard layouts based on AsianExtended. One is:
Asian Extended US
and the other is:
Asian Extended UK

The difference from the original AsianExtended is that they use Option + i as dead-key for circumflex accent (this is more consistent with the behaviour of the "normal" Apple Roman keyboard, where Option + i is always used as dead-key for circumflex accent). Key combination for dotless i has changed. Now it's "option-w then i". The UK version is for the UK keyboard. They have also new, better looking icon.
I added four Keyboard Viewer images to each of the new keyboard layouts, one for Plain, another for Shift, another for Option, and the fourth for Option+Shift. If you want to use one or both of these new keyboard layouts, you might want to download the original AsianExtended package also, as it contains more extended documentation.

By the way, AsianExtended itself has a new, better looking icon, made by Kino-san.

Please download:
Asian Extended US from here
and
Asian Extended UK from here.

Thank you again, Kino-san!


How to Install:

You will have to put the bundle folder named
AsianExtended.bundle
in one of the following locations:
/Users/[your_user_name]/Library/Keyboard Layouts/
/Library/Keyboard Layouts/
/Network/Library/Keyboard Layouts/

If you are the only user of your computer, the first location is probably the best one. If the folder "Keyboard Layouts" doesn't exist in you "Library" folder, you will have to create one (note that there is a space between "Keyboard" and "Layouts").

After installation, you will open:
System Preferences (from the Apple Menu, or the Dock)
then select
International (in "Personal")
then
Input Menu

You will find there the Input menu named "AsianExtended" (type "Unicode").
Check the check box, close the window, and quit System Preferences.

If you don't find "AsianExtended" in the list of Input menus (I copy the following from the ReadMe of Latin TL Keyboard layout, created by Kino [http://quinon.com/files/keylayouts/LatinTL_X.dmg.sit]):

1. Trash
/Library/Caches/com.apple.IntlDataCache.kbdx.501
(where 501 is your user ID which may be a different number)
2. Log out and log back in.

After installation, you will be able to use the new keyboard layout in any Cocoa applications, such as TextEdit, Mail.app, etc.

NEW (Feb. 2004):
You may have experienced some oddity with the meyboard menu (especially on OS 10.2.x, Jaguar): vanishment or replacement of selected items, unexplicable emergence of unwanted items... Kino-san wrote a little step by step instruction to fix these problems (in my experience, these problems seem solved in OS 10.3.x): if you have problems, please read his:
KeyboardMenuOddity.txt

How to Use It:

You will find a full description of different characters that can be typed with this keyboard layout in the file named "AsianExtended_CharList.rtf"; there are indications on some caveats also.

You can also open the keylayout file itself (please use a copy of the file), or the file "Layout_with_hex_equivalents.txt" with TextEdit. You will find many indications as to its difference from U.S. Extended keylayout, on which it is based.

And you can use Key Caps (that you will find in /Applications/Utilities/) to see the keycode mapping of different characters on your own keyboard.

Documents Used to Create this Keylayout:

1. the file "U.S. Extended.keylayout", that can be found at:
/System/Library/Keyboard Layouts/Unicode.bundle/Contents/Resources/
AsianExtended.keylayout is based on this keylayout.
2. Apple document that you will find at:
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2056.html
3. the document named "mac-us-ext.kmap" that you will find at:
http://handhelds.org/download/intimate/release/usr/share/keymaps/mac/

There are also documents of Unicode Standard that were used to create this keylayout. You will find them in the Unicode Standard site, at:

http://www.unicode.org/
Most important documents are:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf for Latin-1 Supplement;
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0100.pdf for Latin Extended-A;
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf for Latin Extended-B;
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U02B0.pdf for Spacing Modifier Letters;
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf for Combining Diacritical Marks;
and
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1E00.pdf for Latin Extended Additional.

I would also like to express my gratitude to Kino who created the bundle folder and helped me in different way to create this keylayout.

If you have any suggestion, comment or feedback, please write me!

2002.12.25
Nobumi Iyanaga
(n-iyanag@ppp.bekkoame.ne.jp)


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This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 10:36:24 AM. Thanks for checking it out! Nobumi Iyanaga