In response to unanswered comments on our blog

I recently discovered a number of comments on our blog that had gone unnoticed, and for which we received no notification. I’m sorry: I want to respond to all the comments and questions. Now that I’ve found the comments, I’ll respond here, even though it’s really too late!

Obviously, we’ll be making sure that we are notified of comments more reliably from here on.

Michael said, on Keyman For iPhone And iPad Font Issues Resolved With iOS 8:

Thank You for the great Job!!! I had a quick question regarding using keyman font in my website for users to see the website correctly in mobile safari. Would this be possible if I install keyman in my website and use font-face.

Thanks Michael! The best way to include a font on your website for users to see in Mobile Safari and other locations is to use the @font-face; you don’t necessarily need Keyman on your site if you don’t need your users to type. More information on how to use @font-face can be found with a Google search; css-tricks.com is one useful site.

Bernard Taylor said, on Keyman For Android 1.4 Released (And Still Free!):

I keep searching for a classical Greek keyboard that includes the 2 breathing marks: smooth and rough needed for vowels that begin words. Without these diacriticals it is of no use for classical, only Modern Greek; with them it would really be a great app. Am I overlooking such a kbd, or is it yet to be developed? None of the ones that say “classical” appear to include these essentials.

Bernard, thanks for asking. Yes, all the Classical / Ancient Greek keyboards we include have the breathing marks, and plenty more besides. You can learn more, including how to type, at: keyman.com/greek. This site is still desktop-oriented, but the touch versions are similar.

Rich Garratt said, on Keyman For Android 1.4 Released (And Still Free!):

Would be nice to be able to download the app via Yandex.Store

Rich, this may be available in the future — it’s hard to keep up with all the different Android distribution models, so for now we’ve chosen to stick with just one store, which means Google Play makes the most sense, until we are more established on the Android platform.

Tano Fotang said, on Creating Custom Keyboards For Keyman For Android And Keyman For iPhone And iPad:

“id: (ID of the keyboard. It must always match the internal name of the keyboard in the keyboard .js file)” What is the id if the js file starts as follows: KeymanWeb.KR(new Keyboard_xx());function Keyboard_xx(){this.KI=”Keyboard_xx”;this.KN=”Mykeyb”;… Is it “Keyboard_xx”, “Mykeyb” or “xx”?

Good question! We’ve updated the post accordingly (in May 2014) with the following text: What is the keyboard id in the keyboard’s .js file? This is built from the KI member variable in the .js file, and reflects a type-safe name based on the original filename of the keyboard source file. A type-safe name contains only a-z, 0-9 and underscore. The compiler will translate the original file name to lower case, and replace any invalid characters with underscores, in both the KI variable and the output .js filename. Finally, the KI variable is prefixed with “Keyboard_”. This should not be included in the id. For example, in the keyboard above, the KI variable is defined as follows:

this.KI=”Keyboard_ekwtamil99uni”;

And thus the id should be just “ekwtamil99uni”.

Ray said, on Creating Custom Keyboards For Keyman For Android And Keyman For iPhone And iPad:

Thanks for the hard work on Keyman in general and this article as well. I have an existing keyboard and I followed the article to the point where I can install my custom keyboard fine (no install failed message, anymore), but it doesn’t display the font on the on-screen keyboard nor does pushing button does anything. This leads me to think that my JS file is bad. The link above does not talk about the JS file but rather stopped with the KMN file. I first tried to use the code in the “code” tab under “Touch Layout” but that didn’t work. Next I looked up the output for https://r.keymanweb.com/api/2.0/keyboards and I grabbed one of the JS files in the browser and I saw the format is more like that generated by “Compile to Web”. So my JS file now looks like: KeymanWeb.KR(new Keyboard_shan());function Keyboard_shan(){this.KI=”Keyboard_shan”;this.KN=”Shan_tzerngkoang”;this.KV={F:’ 1em “Padauk”‘……… My JSON file is here: http://surehope.net/shantools/ref/shan.json Any suggestions on why it is not working would be appreciated! Thanks

I know this is really, really late, but we’ve updated Keyman since you asked this; the JSON file appears to be syntactically correct as far as I can tell, and I was able to successfully install the keyboard into Keyman for iPhone. However, the font you have referenced will not work as a system font on iOS, because you need to have a .mobileconfig font profile in order to install the font. You can list multiple fonts in the .json description, for example just change the filename to “filename”:[“notomyanmar.ttf”,”notomyanmar.mobileconfig”] (assuming you have the .mobileconfig version already).