Developing Keyman
Character Identifier tool
The Tavultesoft Character Identifier breaks down a Unicode string to show you how it is constructed, and identifies the fonts on your system which will work best with the text you have entered.
Developing Keyboards
The group(final) design pattern: handling end-of-word rules
Learn how to utilise Keyman Desktop's group functionality when designing keyboard layouts, and how to manage end-of-word rules.
Web/Tech
How to turn a smile into a theta, or the ever changing smiley
Have you ever encountered an email with a puzzling J or L sitting in the middle of the text? I certainly have! Here's the story. Outlook (and Word), for many years now, has included an autocorrect feature that converts :-) into . Originally, this happy little smiley face was in Read more…
Developing Keyman
Accepting Unicode input in your Windows application
This blog post is a refresh of some documentation that has been buried for years on the Tavultesoft website. It is perhaps less important now than it was 5 years ago, but it is still helpful for those poor souls among us who are tasked with looking after existing legacy Read more…
Developing Keyman
Designing the new Tavultesoft home page
As part of the Keyman Desktop 8.0 release work, we needed to give the Tavultesoft website some attention: the pages were looking dated, and the content had grown over time and was getting out of control. The Tavultesoft website has thousands of pages of content, and finding the right content Read more…
Developing Keyman
Keyman Desktop 8.0 Default Options
Today we had a meeting to finalise the default options for Keyman Desktop 8.0, and determine how we would migrate option settings when upgrading from earlier versions of Keyman Desktop. For those of you who are interested, I reproduce the table below. Any comments or suggestions are always welcomed! Option Read more…
Developing Keyman
Adobe Reader X’s Sandbox and Keyman Desktop
Adobe recently released a secured version of Reader which includes a new security feature called sandboxing. A sandbox restricts the privileges of the PDF viewer built into Adobe Reader to access computer resources, which in turn helps to reduce the impact of as-yet undiscovered security flaws in the PDF viewer, Read more…
Using Keyman Desktop
Where has my Keyman Desktop icon gone?!?
On Windows 7, we are hearing about a common problem that you are having: you are having trouble finding the Keyman Desktop icon where it normally lives, down in the notification area or ‘tool tray,’ which by default is at the bottom right of your screen. For some of you, Read more…
Developing Keyboards
Techniques for Complex Script Keyboards – Visual Input Order
A few days ago I was assisting a Tamil customer with a Unicode keyboard they had designed which used visual input order. Visual input order means that vowels such as TAMIL VOWEL SIGN E, U+0BC6 ெ are typed before the consonant with which they combine, even though they are stored Read more…
Developing Keyman
Installing Keyman 8
In the last week, I've spent a fair bit of time tidying up the installer. There were a number of issues I had to resolve, such as problems upgrading when the user's admin status had been removed in between the original install and the upgrade … yep, we've had to Read more…