tone marks on top of letters

[Patrik]

Dear Ukulele-Users

I am currently trying to figure out the easiest way to write phonetics for a Thai language course. 

Therefore I started to look into Ukulele.

Beside the latin vowels, there are some additional vowels which I will place on some unused keys - that's not the problem. 

The problem are the tone marks, that I have to put on top of the vowels. Every vowel can be in 5 different tones - so I need to be able to write every letter and then choose the tonemark. 

For a better understanding, these are the letters with the tone marks, that I need to be able to write;

a	à	â	á	ǎ
e	è	ê	é	ě
ɛ	ɛ̀	ɛ̂	ɛ́	ɛ̌
ə	ə̀	ə̂	ə́	ə̌
i	ì	î	í	ǐ
ɔ	ɔ̀	ɔ̂	ɔ́	ɔ̌
o	ò	ô	ó	ǒ
u	ù	û	ú	ǔ
ʉ	ʉ̀	ʉ̂	ʉ́	ʉ̌

My wish is, to write ^ + u and get û.

The keyboard that I've already created, doesn't put the tone mark symbols on top - they appear just beside the letter. How can I fix that?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Best regards,

Patrik

[Geke]

Hi Patrik,

There is much talk in Ukelele’s manual about dead keys, but that is not going to work so well for your project, I feel.

I think the more natural approach is to type first the base letter (for the vowel) and then the tone mark to be added to that base letter.

This works in most applications, but it’s good to check if it does in the one you’ll be using.

The important point for you here is that Unicode contains two variants of most diacritics: one spacing, working just like other characters, the other "combining".

If you assign your four combining diacritics to some easy-to-reach keys, typing with your custom layout will become quite comfortable.

In the applications where this works, the position of the tone marks is automatically adjusted to the letter before: wide or narrow, capital or low-case, and you can even "stack" diacritics.

On the following line, I’ve typed the same diacritic after each letter:

 ìàÀå̀Å̀ầ

Assigning them to a key in Ukelele can be done by entering their Unicode number. See the manual, point 3.1.3.

Or you can type their characters with the built-in keyboard layout called "Unicode Hex Input". That's how I entered them here:

U+0300  ̀

U+0302  ̂

U+0301  ́

U+030C  ̌

You can read more here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_Diacritical_Marks

[Tom Gewecke]

On May 23, 2018, at 11:17 AM, Patrik <patrik...@bluewin.ch> wrote:

Dear Ukulele-Users

I am currently trying to figure out the easiest way to write phonetics for a Thai language course. 

Any reason not to just use the ABC Extended keyboard layout provided by Apple?  It uses option key shortcuts to type them either before or after the base character.