spec(developer): LDML Keyboard Designer 🗼

[mcdurdin]

Introduction

This is a holding issue for the Keyman Developer LDML keyboard designer. We'll be filling this in as we complete planning and design.

Objective: build a tool that allows intuitive and visual editing of LDML keyboards for all platforms.

There are many parts to this, including visual editors, transform editors, testing interfaces. The intent is to build this in Typescript in such a way that it can be integrated into Keyman Developer but also in the future run as a standalone web app.

Related

• Draft spec
• spec(developer): LDML to KVKS tool 🙀 #5077: spec: LDML to KVKS tool
• spec(developer): LDML to keyman-touch-layout tool 🙀 #5078: spec: LDML to keyman-touch-layout tool

Blocks the following Issues

• feat(developer): LDML tool for users to run the LDML tests #10192
• feat(developer): extend ldml keyboards to support icon #10549
• feat(developer): support line numbers for LDML compiler errors #10622
• feat(developer): emit ldml test case as markdown 🙀  #10815
• feat(core): expose marker identifiers (and other debug data?) from ldml keyboards for LDML keyboard debugger #10552
• bug(core): dx ldml test source has issue with non-ascii source xml 🙀 #11083

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Keyman Developer:

• OS: Windows (Web)
• Keyman version: target 15.0

[mcdurdin]

Moved to 16.0 to align with updated LDML Keyboard spec

[srl295]

Adding some overall design points here , from 2024-March discussion:

Major Areas:

• Repertoire Builder
  • pulls from SLDR/CLDR where possible for exemplars
  • choose/augment from char map
  • Strings, not codepoints
• Keybag
  • Not 1:1 with repertoire: may be many more in repertoire, especially for touch
• Layout
  • Hardware or touch
  • may start with hardware, then copy to touch
• Transforms
• XML editor

[mcdurdin]

Related, from FV team (@caforbes, @HopsAndHops, @xyzhelen) feedback, fits in with our repertoire builder concept:

Create a “palette” of unicode characters for quick reference. (Starred characters for a
project? Favorites?) It would be nice to have a tray that users can slot characters that
they’re using across the keyboard into rather than needing to search the character, then
through all of the options. One example of this is grabbing a combining accent when
building forms in Developer - it would be much faster to add it to a smaller window to be
selected and inserted later.

• The palette could also be built up through what users add to stores and in rules -
  this would ensure that the same character is used across the keyboard and it would
  be more noticeable if for example, U+0331 and U+0332 are used interchangeably
  through the existing code