Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
In previous years, the Internationalization and Unicode Conference has been a place where important upcoming projects/products got announced.
For example, there was the 18th IUC in Hong Kong where Cathy Wissink and I snuck in a last minute presentation entitled "Unicode on Downlevel Windows" where a ho hum and boring presentation turned into the first public annoucement of the Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Win9x Systems (MSLU).
And then there was the 23rd IUC in Prague where Cathy and I took an innocuous sounding talk entitled "Unicode and Keyboards on Windows" which turned into the surprise announcement of Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC).
Now that the 30th Internationalization and Unicode Conference in Washington, D.C. is over, I thought I'd mention that during my Thursday morning prseentation "Keyboards on Win32: Beyond the Keyboard Layout Creator" I did, I (among other things) got to announce that the update to MSKLC was happening!
I guess it really pays to show up at presentations I give and/or co-give at conferences, doesn't it? :-)
Major plans for the update:
I guess you could nickname the release MSKLC Vista and not be too far off, given the clear focus on Vista. And the plan is to get it out as close to the end of January Vista street date as we possibly can.
Lots of positive feedback from all the people I talked to there, and now everyone who reads here gets to hear about it (the folks who were willing to pay the price of hearing me blather got to find out almost 40 hours sooner!).
Other stuff also got mentioned, and I will be talking about all of it soon....
Are you excited yet? I am!
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I have a request for your next version of MSKLC. In fact, I have been demanding it for quite some time.
What I want is to have a facility to assign different Unicode codepoints to a particular key based on the previous key pressed.
Let me explain. I want to assign either the pure vowel II (ಈ, in Kannada, 0C88) or vowel sign II (ೀ, in Kannada, 0CC0), depending on what was the previous keystroke in the buffer. For example, the previous character is not a consonant or consonant cluster which can not add a vowel sign, then the pressed key "I" should be interpreted as pure vowel 0C88. If the previous character is a consonant or consonant cluster which can add a vowel sign, then the pressed key "I" should be interpreted as vowel sign 0CC0. The KGP Layout in the Kannada Indic IME available for download at www.bhashaindia.com web-site has this layout (called as KGP layout meaning Karnataka Govt Prescribed). This was originally developed by K P Rao about 3 decades ago.
This is not actually possible within the model for which MSKLC creates keyboard layout DLLs, sorry! :-(
(Other than the dead keys feature that exists there now, that is.)
Try Keyman Developer (www.tavultesoft.com) - we support contextual input
So, it's now over and tomorrow I am flying back to Redmond. The talks were done last Thursday at IUC
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