How to Add Diacritics to Ethiopic letters on Ukelele?

[Mamush TM]

Hello, I was wondering if anyone has tried adding diacritics to the Ethiopic letters on Ukelele? Any help/guidance would be much appreciated. Thank you!

[Sorin Paliga]

I have not tried, but it should work with Combining Diacritical Marks. This area should work with any character. I have been using this method for years, not with Ethiopic, but with Latin chars, but it is ultimately the same issue.

Put the attached files in /Library/Keyboard Layouts, then restart, when logged in activate the stuff and/or open it with UKELELE, you may have a hint on how to proceed.

[Tom Gewecke]

If you want to know how it will look, you can just manually try adding the combining diacritics from the Unicode 0300 range to individual letters with Character Viewer.  Ukelele will not change that.  Here I did some.

ሀ́  ሂ̀  ለ̂ ሐ̃  ሠ̄  

[Mamush TM]

Thanks so much for the quick replies Cattus and Tom!

[Sorin Paliga]

Essentially, you may ‘instruct’ a keyboard layout to put any diacritical mark above/below any char or you may create precomposed chars composed from a basic char + its CDM. If you choose the former variant, it is the most flexible: any CDM above/below any char, the second is, of course, quite strict.

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[Gé van Gasteren]

On Sun, Dec 5, 2021 at 6:58 PM Mamush TM <temari...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello, I was wondering if anyone has tried adding diacritics to the Ethiopic letters on Ukelele? Any help/guidance would be much appreciated. Thank you!

 

I’m not sure of your situation:
Are you asking how to type diacritics in a text editor with your existing keyboard layout?

Or do you know they are not included and you want to add them to it?

Which keyboard layout do you use for Ethiopic/Amharic script? (I can’t find any in the list of built-in layouts.)

Is that a simple keyboard layout or an "input method"?

[Tom Gewecke]

On Dec 5, 2021, at 1:43 PM, Gé van Gasteren <gevang...@gmail.com> wrote:

Which keyboard layout do you use for Ethiopic/Amharic script? (I can’t find any in the list of built-in layouts.)

MacOS starting with Monterey includes an Amharic keyboard.  It is a normal keyboard layout but has a lot of dead keys to create the syllabic glyphs.

[Mamush TM]

Oh that’s good to know about MacOS Monterey including Amharic layouts. I’m updating my software now, thanks Tom and also Gé van for bringing this up .

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[Gé van Gasteren]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2021 at 12:18 AM Mamush TM <temari...@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh that’s good to know about MacOS Monterey including Amharic layouts. I’m updating my software now, thanks Tom and also Gé van for bringing this up .

It seems I’m good at asking questions, and Tom undoubtedly has a lot of answers :-)

 

Even if you have an earlier macOS version, I assume it’ll be possible to "borrow" the keyboard layout from somebody using Monterey and install it on your Mac.

E.g., produce a copy of it on the computer running Monterey using the Ukelele command "New from current input source".

[Mamush TM]

You're so right about that, Gévan! :D And I appreciate you both! :-) 

I've installed macOS Monterey and really like the new stuff that came with it, including the Amharic keyboard layout. BTW, I tried creating a keyboard layout on Ukelele using "New from current input source" (after selecting the Ge'ez/Amharic keyboard that's added in Monterey), but got the following error, which reads, "The file “Geʽez.keylayout” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file." 

[Gé van Gasteren]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2021 at 4:24 PM Mamush TM <temari...@gmail.com> wrote:

I tried creating a keyboard layout on Ukelele using "New from current input source" (after selecting the Ge'ez/Amharic keyboard that's added in Monterey), but got the following error, which reads, "The file “Geʽez.keylayout” couldn’t be opened because there is no such file." 

I see from your screenshot that you’ve been quite active looking for solutions! :-)

But this looks like a real problem:

This Ukelele command relies on macOS to convert a built-in keyboard layout into XML, which is Ukelele’s format.

In the past, there have been more problems with that conversion whenever a new macOS version was released.

John, Ukelele’s developer, usually finds a solution, or Apple fixes the problem, but that takes time.

Which input method have you been using so far?

[Mamush TM]

Thanks, Gévan! And yes, I'm trying to learn all I can on this:-)

By input method, are saying which key layout? I've been using an Ethiopic key layout that Tom (and John) graciously emailed me. I like that key layout a lot because it includes both the U.S. and Ethiopic keyboards by just switching the "caps lock" on and off. I've been learning on that, remapping the keys etc, and now I'm trying to learn how to add diacritics to the Ethiopic characters and a few other things along the way. :)

[Gé van Gasteren]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2021 at 5:52 PM Mamush TM <temari...@gmail.com> wrote:

By input method, are saying which key layout? I've been using an Ethiopic key layout that Tom (and John) graciously emailed me. I like that key layout a lot because it includes both the U.S. and Ethiopic keyboards by just switching the "caps lock" on and off. I've been learning on that, remapping the keys etc, and now I'm trying to learn how to add diacritics to the Ethiopic characters and a few other things along the way. :)

Hey, that sounds like you are – almost – set, you just need to find places in your custom keyboard layout for typing the diacritics.

If there are only a few letters with diacritic marks, you can probably fit them into the current structure.

(If you can attach your custom layout, and maybe a list of necessary letter+mark combinations, the picture would become clearer.)

But if there are lots of such special letters, especially with several diacritic marks stacked on them, it may work better if you can get used to typing the diacritic marks AFTER the base letter.

Then you’d need only one slot for each diacritic mark.

[Mamush TM]

Great! Thank you, Gévan! I'm gonna try all that and I appreciate you all!