Unicode is a character encoding standard that supports most of the world's more common scripts, and includes support for user-defined scripts. Unicode is rapidly being accepted as a standard in modern applications and operating systems.

Using Unicode instead of ANSI in a keyboard is very simple: you have a begin Unicode statement rather than begin ANSI, and you specify characters with U+xxxx, where xxxx is a four-digit hexadecimal number.

If you are not familiar with the hexadecimal (base-16) numbering system, don't worry: you can use the Character Map in Keyman Developer to find the character you want, and then drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste its character code into your keyboard.

Note that you must be careful to use the right character: The Unicode standard has several characters with the same shape as another, but a different meaning; an example of this is the Greek capital letter Sigma and the mathematical summation symbol (). However, an application supporting Unicode would treat them differently. If in doubt whether a character is the right one, you can look up the reference tables at www.unicode.org.

Note that a keyboard can contain both a begin Unicode and a begin ANSI statement. In this case, Keyman will determine whether the current application supports Unicode or not, and use the appropriate group.

Converting the Quick French keyboard to Unicode is thus basically a matter of looking up the right Unicode character codes and replacing the ANSI codes with them. Here are the character codes:

The addition of a group to handle Unicode is left as an exercise for the reader.

With the topic of Unicode, the Keyman Developer tutorial is complete. You should now know how to create even moderately complex keyboards. For information on using the more advanced features of the keyboard language for complex keyboards, read the other sections of the Programmer's Guide.