Keyman Update for 13 October 2023

This blog reports on significant Keyman product and keyboard development updates over the two weeks from 2 – 13 October 2023.

As always, you can follow all of our development online at github.com/keymanapp/keyman, and you may find the Keyman Development Status Site at status.keyman.com both interesting and slightly overwhelming!

Keyman minor releases

Keyman 17.0.184-alpha through 17.0.190-alpha were released in this cycle.

Keyboard updates

New Keyboards

• Published a new keyboard for the Gəəmg language of Sudan. This keyboard produces NFD (decomposed) characters (#2377, #2396), thanks to Development and Literacy Partners International
• Rusyn keyboard is a rewrite of the earlier keyboards for Rusyn language. Many thanks to @novta (#2228, #2384, #2392)

Updated keyboards

• The Old Hungarian keyboard has been updated to version 1.7.8, to include longpress menus on touch devices, thank you to @rovasiras (#2381)
• Version 1.3 of the Chinuk Wawa keyboard was released which makes ejective letters easier to use on mobile phones with longpress menus. Kudos to @cachang (#2387)
• Colchis Latin has been updated to version 1.4.1, adding dotted T back in to the keyboard, and fixing bugs in mobile layouts. This keyboard is for transcription of Lazuri and Mingrelian languages. (#2385)
• Colchian Phonetic is now on version 1.1, making the mobile layout easier to use by making the keys bigger. Colchian Phonetic keyboard is for the Mingrelian language using Asomtavruli. (#2386)
• BU Phonetic has been updated to version 2.1, and now uses the Unicode saltillo codepoint U+A78C, instead of the old Private Use Area codepoint, many thanks to @emily-roth (#2391)
• Burushaski Girminas 2.0.24 is a Latin/Roman based keyboard developed by Quwat K. Sunny for the orthography approved by Burusho Maʰraka, a representative body of all three varieties of Burushaski, from Hunza, Nagar and Yasin, and has been updated to fix some minor bugs and improve the mobile phone layout. Thank you to @quwatsunny (#2395)

Minor updates

• Cameroon QWERTY: Fixed broken documentation links. Thanks to @MattGyverLee (#2382)
• Gondi INSCRIPT (Gunjala): Fixed broken documentation links (#2383)
• Övdalsk: Fixed broken documentation links and on screen keyboard documentation (#2378)
• The Ɂareɂare keyboard (version 1.1) has been slightly renamed, from ɁAreɂare — can you spot the difference? (#2390)
• Tai Tham MY keyboard documentation has been refreshed to have more reliable Tai Tham font display (#2397)

Significant Keyman changes

The following changes have recently landed in the Keyman alpha 17.0 builds, which is the pre-release version of Keyman currently under development.

For keyboard developers, .keyboard_info files (that are used in the Keyman keyboards repository) are now generated entirely from the package and keyboard files. Extra fields are available in packages for license file, welcome file, typing examples, related packages (including deprecated packages), and additional font files. This feature will be available with the release of version 17.0. (#9485)

For developers integrating with Keyman Core, there are two breaking changes coming with Keyman 17.0 relating to names in the Keyman Core API:

• Header file has been renamed from keyboardprocessor.h to keyman_core_api.h (#9723)

• API identifiers have been renamed from km_kbp_ to km_core_ (#9724)

And finally, when Keyman 17.0 is released, the keyboard and lexical model repositories will have new build scripts which are much, much faster, and more consistent, but there will be some changes in usage. These changes will be documented on the Keyman Developer help site before release. (lm#226, kbd#2393)