Keyman Update for 21 July 2023

This blog reports on significant Keyman product and keyboard development updates over the two weeks ending on 21 July 2023.

Keyman 16.0.140 release

On Friday, 21 July 2023, we released an update to Keyman 16, to address a number of minor issues. Significant changes are highlighted here; full details are available in the change log. These changes should not impact most users.

• fix(linux): Display error message for corrupt .kmp file (#8480)
• chore(ios): support for Xcode 14 (#8487)
• fix(developer): package editor no longer loses RTL flag for lexical models (#8607)
• fix(core): Fix compiling with GCC 13 (#8932)

Keyman 17 upcoming highlights

Today, we’re highlighting two significant upcoming features in the Keyman 17 release, due later this year. We’ll continue to highlight new features over the coming weeks.

In Keyman 17, we’ll finally have full support for Wayland on Linux (#4273). This means that Keyman will now work more smoothly with default installs of most modern Linux distributions.

In Keyman Developer, we have created a solution to a long-standing issue with diacritic marks and other “unattached marks” on the On Screen Keyboard, with the &displayMap feature (#9032).

Before this fix, some keyboards would have poorly rendered marks on some platforms, such as this example of Khmer Angkor, shown here in KeymanWeb. Note how some key caps have repeated dotted circles and marks not fitting well on keys:

After the fix, you can see that the repeated dotted circle marks have been resolved:

Inconsistent rendering of these characters between operating systems and even operating system versions have made this issue quite challenging to fix but we are pleased that we have finally been able to create a solution that is applicable to any writing system!

GFF Ethiopic Keyboard and Dictionary Updates

Following on from our last blog, Geez Frontier Foundation / Daniel Yacob have released further updates to their Ethiopian and Eritrean keyboards and lexical models:

• A major update to the GFF Geʾez v2.0 keyboard (#2289, #2298)
• Minor improvements to GFF Tigrinya-Ethiopia Lexical Model v1.0.1 (#219) and GFF Tigrinya-Eritrea Lexical Model v1.0.1 (#220)
• Bug fixes for GFF Mesobe Fidelat v1.1 (#2286), GFF Harege Fidelat v1.1 (#2287) and GFF Harari v1.0.4 (#2290) keyboards.
• And marking older GFF keyboards as “deprecated” (#2291)

New keyboard layouts

We published a new keyboard, Sorani Behdini (Qwerty), designed for typing Kurdish Sorani Behdini in the Arabic script. It is based on a phonetic layout. (#2288)

Other keyboard updates

Here is a list of the wide variety of keyboard updates that have been published in the last two weeks:

• A fix for typing conjuncts for the common_devanagari keyboard (#2283), with thanks to Raji1205.
• Improved documentation for the Tai Tham MY keyboard (#2280, #2293)
• An updated Kay Pho Du font for the SIL Kayah Li keyboard, which supports the Karenni (Kayah) language in the Kayah Li script (#2292)
• Updates to the Old Hungarian layout to improve mobile layouts, particularly punctuation and digits (#2295, #2306), with thanks to rovasiras.
• The Balochi Scientific keyboard has been made available to mobile devices and tablets. The Balochi Scientific keyboard is designed for the scientific Latin script transcription of Balochi languages using the system devised at Uppsala University (#2308).
• The Lao Phonetic keyboard has been made available to mobile devices and tablets (#2308).
• We’ve implemented various quality improvements to keyboards to improve compatibility when modifying them on non-Windows platforms (#2299, #2305, #2307)
• And finally, we improved the look and feel of layer switch keys on a number of keyboards (#2301)

Thanks for reading!