Keyman Keyboards for Tone Text

[lancejpollard]

Started on a Keyman Keyboard for Tone Text. Still figuring out how to use Keyman.

[lancejpollard]

After working on this for a bit, I am starting to think a keyboard which shows Tone glyphs might not be the correct approach. Instead, Tone is meant to be typed using an ASCII system, so it's easy to write with a regular keyboard and you don't have to use/learn a custom keyboard. The ASCII symbols Tone uses are all defined here for now.

For example, complex vowels can be typed like this:

example	description
I$&--@_^	Here is a complex example, the vowel "i" with stress, lengthening, tense, nasalization and extra low tone
d*h~	Here is the African click consonant with aspiration, which kind of mimics the "d" sound
m	A plain "m" consonant

An older legend/guide was made a while back, to quickly show how to write common stuff for Tone Text using ASCII.

That said, perhaps a Keyman keyboard could be made more concise than the ASCII typing system, but I'm not sure, would have to think a lot about that. A lot of thought went into the ASCII system, so probably I'm guessing it would take a lot of thought to come up with a brief/concise typing keyboard using Tone glyphs.

Would love to know your thoughts if you find this post!