Languages

YNLC Keyboards

We are working on our YNLC fonts and keyboards, and hope to have them available to download soon.

The YNLC keyboards are intended to

—work for all eight Yukon languages and more

—use Caps Lock to toggle between US English and Yukon typing

—use the same keystrokes as the older Yukon Font system

—work identically on Windows and Macintosh

—be freely distributed

These intentions are mostly realized. The keyboards give access to more base characters and diacritics than are needed for Yukon practice. The Caps Lock toggle works on both platforms. The most important and most common keystrokes are the same as with the Yukon Font system. That old system had special, idiosyncratic devices to get two diacritics above characters. Such devices are not necessary with the YNLC system which uses the Unicode combining diacritics. With the YNLC system each diacritic has a separate key. The Yukon Font system in some cases used different ways on Mac and Windows to get the same result. The YNLC system is identical on Mac and Windows with the exception of barred-l (option-l on Mac, alt-control-l or 1 on Windows), and some base characters used for technical purposes.

How to Type

The PDF file, Yukon Keyboard Layouts, is a one page document with typing instructions. It explains how and why Caps Lock is used to toggle between regular and Yukon typing, it gives a diagram of the eleven keys whose value changes when Caps Lock is in/on, and it tells how to access the extra base letters for linguistics or historical work. The first image below from the Macintosh Keyboard Viewer displays the keyboard with Caps Lock in, and the second with both Caps Lock and Shift pressed in. The images show the diacritic keys changing when shifted. The PDF file, Yukon Keyboard Layouts, is better to use when learning the keystrokes. It also shows the option/alt-control and option-shift/alt-control-shift states.

Programming Keyboards

For both Macintosh and Windows it is now reasonably easy to make keyboards which the operating system treats like any other keyboard made by Apple or Microsoft. It is not necessary to have a third-party keyboard interpreter.

Windows Keyboard

Microsoft now supplies a free utility to develop or modify keyboards, the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). It runs on 2000, XP, or Server 2003, but not on 95, 98, Me or NT4. (A new keyboard can sometimes be installed, though, on NT4.) An extremely useful feature is the utility's ability to package the keyboard in an installer. With MSKLC, Microsoft surpasses Apple for the first time, in supplying tools for keyboard development. (The KCHR editor in ResEdit was the best pre-Unicode tool.) A drawback of the Microsoft system is that keyboards for lesser known languages must be associated with one of the predefined locales supported by the operating system. For mnemonic purposes for the YNLC keyboard I have chosen the Catalan locale, because then one sees the options EN (US English) and CA (Catalan) in the menu bar. CA is the internet suffix for Canada.

The MSKLC is fairly intuituve, using graphic representations of the keyboard states. For the YNLC keyboard, the US English was opened and extensively modified. No changes were made to the basic state or plain keyboard used with US English. All the changes occured with the states using Caps Lock which gives the effect that Caps Lock is a toggle between US and Yukon. To change the values for a key, right click on the key and select the menu item for changing the properties of all states. In the window for the properties of the e key, advanced view, for example, four states were modified. The Unicode values for e (0065) and E (0045) were copied to the SGCAP and shift+SGCAP states respectively. Two special characters, schwa (0259)and epsilon (025b, technically "open e"), were added at ctrl+alt and shift+ctrl+alt, respectively. For the Caps Lock state, which has the basic Yukon keylayout, it was necessary to replace all the upper case letters with lower case ones. The result is that if one is typing only letter or number keys, the Caps Lock appears to have no effect. All the special characters are on punctuation keys. The Caps Lock with Shift shows shifted Yukon. Again, all the alpha-numeric keys will show upper case letters, while the other keys contain the special signs. The Caps Lock with Control-Alt , and the Caps Lock with Shift-Control-Alt show additional base characters. Of these characters, only the bar-l (slash-l) is regularly used. The others are for teaching or scientific work.

While testing the Yukon keyboard, two kinds of warning messages came up. Some characters are not in the Catalan system code page (1252) which may cause compatibility problems in non-Unicode applications. And many letters, including all the regular ones, are defined twice, for instance, "a" is on the plain "a" key, and on the same key when Caps Lock is on. Likely neither kind of message suggests a critical problem.

Windows Keyboard Downloads

•The archive yukonwin.sitx (740KB) contains both keyboards and fonts.

•The source file yukon.klc (17KB) for use with MSKLC on Windows 2000, XP or Server 2003 (which may be freely modified as long as the name is changed in the modified layouts).

After downloading and decompressing yukonwin.sitx you will see a folder called "yukonwin" containing font and keyboard folders. Open the YNLCkey folder and run the installer, YNLCkey.msi. After the layout is installed, it needs to be activated. On XP Professional, go to Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages > Text services and input languages > Details > Installed services > Add > Input language, and select Catalan as the input language and Yukon with CapsLock as the Keyboard Layout. With other Windows versions follow the directions in Windows Help. To uninstall, remove the keyboard through the control panel, and then run the installer.

Macintosh Keyboard

Sometime after developing the YNLC Keyboard using the steps shown below, Ukele became available. This SIL freeware by John Brownie makes Mac OS keyboard development much easier. It has a graphical interface. You can drag characters from the OS X Character Palette to the desired key in the desired state. It allows multiple level dead keys. It permits the use of Caps Lock as a modifier. What follows here is now (7 April 2006) old fashioned but may still be useful for reference.

A brilliant web site, Unicode Keyboards for Mac OS, by Alex Eulenberg, lets one make Macintosh keylayouts of all kinds without too much trouble. You enter a set of rules in a form, click Create Resource and the file appears on the desktop. This is one of the most useful Mac sites I have ever seen. It is not set up however to permit the use of the Caps Lock as a modifier, like Shift or Option. So to make a keyboard for OS X 10.2 which does use Caps Lock as a modifier requires more work. It may be useful to document the process.

First, I used Alex's site to make two XML keyboards.

(1) A dummy plain US keyboard by using the rule "Sa A" (shift+a=A). This forms the base or target keyboard which will be modified. It is useful to rename it YNLCkey at this point.

(2) A special Yukon-source keyboard using the rules here. It has all the special keystrokes and characters which we will want to use when Caps Lock is active, but at the moment they are in the corresponding non-Caps Lock states. For instance, it has a grave diacritic where one would expect "]" on a US keylayout with no modifier keys pressed.

The idea is to combine the two XML files so that a new file, is created which uses Caps Lock as a toggle. For instance, simply pressing "[" will give "[", but pressing Caps Lock then typing "[" will give a grave. Four modifier key tables, or maps, are harvested from the Yukon-source keyboard and inserted into YNLCkey. In the chart below the generated tables from the Yukon-source keyboard (col. 1) are renumbered and relabelled when inserted into YNLCkey (col. 2). Two tables replace counterparts, and two are added at the end of the list (col. 3). Within each table, some changes also need to be made to the action IDs as indicated (col. 4)

Finally, two tables in YNLCkey need to have their modifier key definitions changed slightly. The string "caps?", which means "ignore the state of the Caps Lock key," needs to be removed from both definitions. The chart below summarizes the changes. In table 1 <modifier keys="anyShift caps?" /> is changed into <modifier keys="anyShift" />. A corresponding table 8 <modifier keys="anyShift caps" /> is added (see above). An original single table with ambiguous Caps Lock state is replaced by two tables with unambiguous Caps Lock states. Similarly, the definition in table 4 <modifier keys="anyShift caps? anyOption" /> is changed to <modifier keys="anyShift anyOption" /> and a corresponding table 9 <modifier keys="anyShift caps anyOption" /> is added.

Macintosh OS X 10.2 Keyboard Downloads

YNLCkey.keylayout (43KB)

YNLCkey.icns (2KB) — the icon for the YNLCkeylayout

Install both files in one of the following locations:

/Library/Keyboard Layouts/

~/Library/Keyboard Layouts/

/Network/Library/Keyboard Layouts/

A lot of information about Apple OS X 10.2 keylayouts can be found at Technical Note TN2056 on Installable Keyboard Layouts.

Page last modified 7 April 2006