Keyman Update for 29 September 2023

This blog reports on significant Keyman product and keyboard development updates over the four weeks from 4 – 29 September 2023.

This report covers four weeks rather than the usual two, due to the Keyman team meetings in early September.

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 17.0.172-alpha through 17.0.183-alpha were released in this cycle.

Keyboard updates

• The Old Hungarian keyboard had two updates, now on version 1.7.6: the Kende font was updated with ligatures for “new ages” and a decimal comma was added, and the mobile layout longpress keys were also updated. Thanks to @rovasiras (#2356, #2367)
  
• The GFF Geʾez Manuscript keyboard (1.0.1) was added to work with the Ethiopic Manuscript Unicode Font Initiative (EMUFI) project. The Ethiopic Manuscript Unicode Font Initiative is a non-profit workgroup of scholars and font designers who would like to see a common solution to a problem felt by many manuscript scholars: the encoding and display of special characters found in Ethiopic manuscripts. The EMUFI project draws inspiration from, and indeed is modelled after, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) project. With thanks to @dyacob (#2357, #2370, #2374)
  
• The FirstVoices project updated two keyboards, Tāłtān (9.1.5) and Kwakwala-Liqwala (9.2.4), with refreshed layouts and output now in NFC. With thanks to @HopsAndHops (#2359, #2360)
  
• A new keyboard is now available for the Lavukaleve language of Solomon Islands (#2363)
  
• A new keyboard and predictive text dictionary for Afghan Turkmen is now available (#2366, #222)
  
• The new Old English keyboard (1.1) has been published. It is designed for typing the Old English language, using the Latin script, with a standard 104- or 105-key layout. It can also be used to type Middle English. It contains all the characters needed to type in Old English and Middle English, including long-s, thorn, that (eth), wynn, yogh, capital and lowercase vowels with macrons (including y), various diacritics, insular and dotted characters, Trionian “and”, and Middle Welsh “Ll” in case it’s needed for place names. Many thanks to @runeboard (#2362, #2368)

• A new keyboard for typing Elfdalian (Övdalsk) language in the Latin script is now available. Thanks to @runeboard, Craig Cornelius (#2364)
  
• The Colchis Latin keyboard (1.4), used for transcription of the Lazuri and Mingrelian languages, was updated to support a revised orthography and include a font (#2372)
  
• The SIL Cameroon QWERTY and SIL Cameroon AZERTY keyboards have been updated to version 6.0.9, improving Caps Lock support, minor styling improvements, and improved documentation layout. Thanks to @MattGyverLee (#2373)
  
• The SIL Eurolatin keyboard (2.0.4) was updated to fix a problem with the comma key on the shift layer in touch layouts (#2376)