Sunday, February 24, 2019

iOS: Custom Keyboard Layouts

While MacOS has had apps enabling ordinary users to easily make custom keyboard layouts (e.g. Ukelele) for a long time already,  the same is not true for iOS.   Users still have to rely on apps produced by developers and offered via the app store.  Below is some info on how these can be made by people with the necessary skills.  The first link relates to making files for the Keyman app, which have to then be compiled on a Windows machine.  The other 3 are tutorials for iOS programmers.

These links are only for screen keyboards.  Development of hardware keyboard layouts remains a mystery.

https://help.keyman.com/developer/10.0/guides/develop/tutorial/


https://medium.com/swift-india/creating-a-custom-keyboard-in-ios-a75e7d5cc5ef


https://medium.com/mackmobile/custom-keyboard-tutorial-ef0c50906f5e


https://www.raywenderlich.com/49-custom-keyboard-extensions-getting-started


If you can make do with somewhat more limited custom input functionality, have a look at Unicode Pad Pro.


Tuesday, February 12, 2019

Fix for "Wrong" Chinese Character Display

In a recent discussion in the Apple Support Community (ASC) a user complained that a certain Chinese character was not being displayed correctly.  As it turned out, it was one of those where the Chinese and Japanese forms are quite different, and his phone was displaying the Japanese version.  This is caused by the device using a Japanese font, instead of a Chinese one, whioh will happen if Japanese is higher than Chinese in the Preferred Languages list.  The particular character was the one for "drink":



For other examples of characters where this can occur, see the chart labeled "Same code point, different language tags" on this page.