I designed a Sinhala phonetic keyboard for Windows computers using the Keyman Developer. In the process I encountered a problem which I will describe below. I hope somebody who met a similar problem in his/her own design would kindly advise me.
I have to first explain a little about how Sinhala is written. Sinhala alphabet has a set of consonants. To these consonants various small appendages (diacritics) are added to get different vowel sounds of that consonant. For example, take the consonant for the sound “k”. The Sinhala letter is really for the sound “ka”. To make the letter to take other vowel sounds diacritics are added to that letter, thus making the sounds “ki”, “ku”, “ke”, “ko” etc respectively. I think this feature is found in many Asian languages.
My problem is that there are three diacritics which have not been included in the Unicode for Sinhala. Therefore I cannot include them in my Keyman keyboard. The Sinhala fonts I am using include these diacritics, but as I find no feature in the Keyman Developer that allows me to add any diacritic or character not in the Unicode.
I am using the version 11 of the Keyman Developer and the font systems “Iskola Potha” or “Abhaya Libre”.
I would be grateful to someone for advising me, as without those diacritic signs, my keyboard is not complete.