What's New in Keyman Developer
What's New in Keyman Developer
Keyman Developer 6.2 is designed to work with Unicode. Unicode is a character encoding standard that supports most of the world's more common languages, and includes support for user-defined languages. Instead of a 256 character (8 bit) standard such as the 8 bit ANSI keyboards supported in Keyman 4.0, Keyman 6.2 and Keyman Developer 6.2 support keyboards with over 1 million characters.
Keyman Developer 6.2 has been split into two editions -- Standard and Professional. We recognised that many keyboard developers did not need all the advanced features that are available in the Professional edition. The tables below list the new features in version 6.2, and tells you which edition they are available in. Pricing for the two editions is available here.
The Evaluation edition of Keyman Developer provides access to both Standard and Professional features. When using the Evaluation edition, professional features are clearly highlighted with the use of a simple watermark.
The features listed below are broken down into New Program features, New Keyboard Language features, and New Packaging and Distribution features.
New Program Features
| Standard | Pro | |
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Allows you to create an on-screen representation of your keyboard which users print for reference or even enter text with. It can be created automatically from most keyboards. The on-screen display can be transparent under Windows 2000 and Windows XP, increasing the useable screen space. | ||
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Lets you export a visual keyboard to an XML file, allowing for a standardised description of the keyboard. | ||
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Enables exporting of visual keyboards to PNG, BMP, or interactive HTML formats for documentation. | ||
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Makes finding and eliminating bugs from complex keyboards much simpler, and allows for better testing. It includes:
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When creating a complex keyboard, it can be difficult sometimes to add a new rule without affecting existing rules. Regression testing allows you to automatically test your keyboard to ensure you haven't changed the behaviour in an undesired manner. You can specify tests either through XML or interactively, and save the tests for the future. | ||
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Warns the user about the possibility of viruses in Word documents included in packages. | ||
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Allows comments and string in the keyboard editor to be displayed in a different font than the remainder of the code. This helps where using a language that is not in the usual editor fonts. | ||
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Facilitates development of complex keyboard projects which might include multiple keyboards as well as related documents and packages. You can build all keyboards and packages automatically after making modifications. | ||
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Allows you to preview how the keyboard source will appear before printing, and also enables printing the syntax highlighting. | ||
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Makes editing HTML and XML files simple, with the use of coloured syntax highlighting specific to each file type. | ||
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The dockable character map displays all ANSI or Unicode characters in a font, along with their codes and properties. It includes support for Unicode character names (Pro edition only) and an improved interface. | ||
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The keyboard wizard is an visual display of the keyboard, and now supports multiple shift states per key. It integrates the bitmap editor and has a much improved user interface. | ||
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When you start Keyman Developer 6.2, a Welcome Dialog with the most common tasks and recently used files will be displayed, increasing the user-friendliness of TIKE. | ||
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A registration wizard is included to simplify the process of registering Keyman Developer online. | ||
New Keyboard Programming Language Features
| Standard | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
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Allows keyboard source files to contain Unicode text in comments or strings. Also can edit text files, XML files, and HTML files in UTF-8 or UTF-16 formats. | ||
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A positional keyboard is one that has an unvarying layout -- no matter what physical keyboard the user has, the layout will not change. A mnemonic layout, on the other hand, adapts itself to the user's layout, thus, for example, enabling phonetic input on a range of European keyboards. | ||
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Provides an easy, readable way to refer to Unicode characters within a keyboard file. Characters can be assigned names which allows you to avoid using their character value, making your keyboard files much clearer. | ||
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Implements all official Unicode character names as named character constants. | ||
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Allows practically unlimited extension of Keyman keyboards with custom DLLs. | ||
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In Keyman 5, deadkeys and virtual keys were not allowed in store statements. Keyman 6 allows you to do this, reducing the complexity of many keyboards. | ||
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Allows output of a single character from the context. | ||
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Keyman 6 allows you to use the index and context statements in the context part of the rule. | ||
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Allows the user to store the SIL Ethnologue language code in the keyboard, for use by third-party applications. | ||
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Provides a meaningful name for a deadkey, where previously only numbers were allowed, simplifying the keyboard source. | ||
New Package and Distribution Features
| Standard | Pro | |
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Allows a custom image or logo to be displayed when installing a package. | ||
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Simplifies the process of creating packages and installers. The editor has also been vastly improved. Multiple keyboards can be included in a single package, and packages can be included inside other packages. | ||
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Allows for integration of package installation with other programs. | ||
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Allows a custom image or logo with user-defined buttons to be displayed on startup of the redistributable installer. | ||
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Readme documents can now contain Unicode characters. | ||
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