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XML-Based Key Layouts are a Lot of Fun
Authored by: mundie1010 on Oct 29, '02 09:54:15AM

I'd like to stress how cool this new mechanism is. As a Dvorak user who also uses non-standard character sets like the International Phonetic Alphabet, I have since 1985 struggled with keyboard layouts on the Mac. For me, the major disappointment of OS X was that there was no way to create custom layouts, so the appearance of this wonderful new key layout facility was a great relief.

The fact that layouts are stored as XML files makes them almost trivial to generate and massage. Best of all, it is easy to write scripts that do general transformations, such as converting any QWERTY layout to its Dvorak equivalent - for example, a Dvorak Extended layout that is the equivalent of U.S. Extended. The same principle could be applied to generate, say, a French Devanagari keyboard.

Within an hour or so I had produced an IPA Dvorak keyboard and a Devanagari Dvorak keyboard. The only problem I encountered was that sometimes the new keyboards wouldn't immediately appear in application menus, even after restarting the application. What seems to work is to launch an application after selecting the new key layout, but before quitting System Preferences.



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XML-Based Key Layouts are a Lot of Fun
Authored by: Viking on May 06, '03 10:11:41AM

Well, for me, I tried to create a whole keyboard using that method and it seems to work, but I still have two problems: the Home and End keys work only in applications like Word X, but not in TextEdit or Mail; and second, I can't put circumflex accent on letters... Have you got an idea?



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