How To Install Keyman Sinhala Keyboard

[Francoise Witsell]

Idesigned a Sinhala phonetic keyboard for Windows computers using the Keyman Developer. In the process I encountered a problem which I will describe below. I hope somebody who met a similar problem in his/her own design would kindly advise me.

My problem is that there are three diacritics which have not been included in the Unicode for Sinhala. Therefore I cannot include them in my Keyman keyboard. The Sinhala fonts I am using include these diacritics, but as I find no feature in the Keyman Developer that allows me to add any diacritic or character not in the Unicode.

Link to Abhaya Libre font. I am sorry that I cannot include a link. I attempted several times to give the link, but each time it is blocked by the SIL server. They do not permit new users to post links in posts. I have to trouble you to find the Abhaya Libre font in Github. Sorry for the extra inconvenience.

Two of the missing diacritics are given in the attached screenshot. Third one is not that important and can be ignored for the present. The first diacritic is more or less a semicircle placed below the consonant. For all the consonants it retains this relative position. The second diacritic is a complex shape placed after the consonant.

As to your observation, the missing diacritics belong to the main Sinhala alphabet, not a regional or a minority one. It is surprising that the committee that coordinated the inclusion of Sinhala to Unicode opted to omit these two. As a result now we are compelled to use workarounds that look crude and uneducated.

In Unicode they chose not to encode all the potential glyphs. They encode the main characters. U+0DCA is your virama and U+200D is a ZERO WIDTH JOINER, so with both of those you could get the output you are looking for.

After installing Keyman Desktop (and possibly rebooting), THEN they can double-click on the .kmp file and it should install the keyboard. The .kps file is not a compiler, it is part of the source that you used in creating the .kmp.

We have another keyboard here: Garp Sinhala 7.2.0 keyboard

All of these keyboards can be downloaded and then installed from these links. They also all have help files that you can access from those pages. I hope one of these will be helpful to you.

Sorry to be returning after a long lapse. Completed the Sinhala keyboard long time back, but lost everything when my laptop was stolen. I almost completed the keyboard once again with the help of an early listing, but cannot recall how I implemented two things.

@prabhath First of all, I am very sorry to hear about your computer troubles and losing your work on the keyboard! I know that is awful to lose all that work. Unfortunately, without a backup or someone who also has your source files, I cannot help you to recover your work. This is one reason we really like people to put their keyboards in the Keyman repository so that the keyboard is always available even with computer loss.

I have implemented a working version of my lost keyboard once again. I used a hardcopy of an early version of the keyboard to build upon and implemented the logic I used for the lost version from memory. Now I am almost there except for the ligatures. If I get that small bit my keyboard will be complete.

Sinhala typewriter keyboard has a traditional layout named Wijesekara keyboard. The keyboards suggested by you follow that layout. I designed my keyboard phonetically similar to the QWERTY keyboard. That permits us, non career typists to migrate easily from English to Sinhala typing. There are many phonetic keyboards for Sinhala, but many suffer from various inadequacies. That is what compelled me to develop one.

Your rule uses U+2000 and not U+200d. See if that fixes the issue. Otherwise, yes. We can help you decompile your previous keyboard. You can upload the kmp to Google drive or dropbox and dm me the link if you wish.

Our unique virtual keyboard technology makes it easy to type in all your programs, including Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, internet browsers and more, as well as supporting the latest version of macOS.

A. Most keyboards will work without change, and even without recompiling. A small subset of keyboards require features which are not yet available in Keyman for macOS. These features will be progressively implemented. Keyman for macOS will inform you when you attempt to install a keyboard if it is using a currently unsupported feature.

A. The short answer is a lot! With keyboards for over 2000 languages, there's a very good chance we have yours covered. You can search for a keyboard for your language here. If we don't already have a keyboard available, you can use Keyman Developer 17.0 (Windows only) to build one!

This June we published a keyboard for the N'Ko script, a writing system designed in the 1940s to meet the needs of African languages. There are a number of exciting ways you can use the new N'Ko keyboard:

The Guinean Soulemana Kante designed N'Ko in the late 1940's to provide Africans with a native script. Today the script is most commonly used for a collection of Mande languages in a region of West Africa centred on Guinea and spreading north to Senegal and Mali, east to Burkina Faso, and south to Ivory Coast. Inspired by Arabic and French, the script is written right-to-left in a cursive line, but employs a full alphabet of consonants and vowels, with diacritics to indicate vowel nasalisation, length, and tone.

Our new N'Ko keyboard is phonetic, crafted to be easy to type for anyone familiar with a standard QWERTY layout. Most letters are typed using the phonetically similar Latin letter or letter combination. When one Latin letter matches more than one N'Ko letter, the extra N'Ko letter can be found on the shift key. For example, e produces 'ߍ', but E produces 'ߋ'.

N'Ko letters join together like Arabic when they display correctly. Many modern fonts and applications wrongly display the letters of N'Ko in an un-joined form. A Graphite font and a Graphite-enabled application are necessary to correctly display N'Ko.

An excellent Graphite font for N'Ko is Conakry, installed with the N'Ko keyboard package. To browse the Internet in N'Ko, you should use Firefox with Graphite-support enabled (Firefox is currently the only browser supporting graphite). On your Desktop, LibreOffice and OpenOffice support Graphite right out of the box. For more options, check out SIL's list of Graphite-enabled applications.

While the diversification away from the desktop now means you can type on just about any device, it also leads to new challenges in developing our products. One of the most prominent, and it's been ongoing since Keyman was born, is font support. We pride ourselves on providing keyboards for over 1000 languages, but this also means that some of the more unique scripts often have poor support, particularly on mobile devices.

For instance, using the original release of Keyman for iPhone and iPad, you can type a message in Amharic and then send it as an email to a friend. In the Keyman app, the Amharic text is displayed correctly, but as soon as it is imported into the Mail app, your lovely message is replaced with square boxes!

The root cause of this is that the iPhone doesn't have the font support necessary to display Amharic correctly. The Keyman app does show it because it downloads and embeds the font directly into the app.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could download and install a font to your entire iPhone? Well now with Keyman 1.1 for iPhone and iPad you can! This functionality is enabled for any iPhone or iPad running iOS 7.0 or later.

With the latest update of Keyman for iPhone and iPad, whenever you download a language that uses a custom font (we will use the example of Amharic), the app will prompt you to install the font onto your phone, like so:

Now the font is installed on your phone and will work with all your apps! This means that you can type your message in Keyman, and use it in any app you like. You can read text messages or emails, websites, Facebook, Twitter and more, all in your language! No more Dreaded Square Box!

Of course, your friends will at first have the same problem when they receive your message: they'll just see those square boxes. Just let them know that they will be able to read your messages by installing Keyman on their iPhone or iPad, and following these steps! Tell them to visit , which has simple instructions on how to fix this problem not only on their iPhone or iPad, but also on their Windows computer and elsewhere.

The tool runs unobtrusively from the System Tray. By clicking on its icon there, you can access its menu. For instance, it lets you quickly switch between the installed languages or show the on-screen keyboard. Likewise, you can open the Character Map, which contains an impressive number of letters and symbols you can insert while you type. Since finding the desired character in such a long list can become really hard, it is very convenient that there is the possibility of searching by different properties. Similarly, the Font Helper is intended to help you find the right character on your keyboard.

By opening the Configuration window, you can manage and install keyboard layouts. Luckily, it is possible to use as many different layouts as you need. Likewise, it lets you associate keyboards to one or multiple languages. I am very pleased with the possibility of building my own keyboard layouts using another tool (Keyman Developer) by the same developer. Moreover, also from Configuration, you can access the list of hotkeys and even set different combinations. Finally, in terms of compatibility, it is excellent news that the program supports Unicode, which means that anything you type will remain readable from everywhere.

All in all, Keyman is ideal for those users needing to switch between keyboard languages frequently. Similarly, it is very likely to be the solution when your language is not readily supported by the operating system. My only dissatisfaction is that I could not find a way to use an extended on-screen keyboard. There are versions of this product for many platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS).

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