Icon for a specific keyboard no longer displays

[Rusty_Riggs]

I have a user that has different icons on each keyboard and one of them has lost the icon that displays in the system tray. The user is using Keyman 8 and has a licensed copy of it.

I have seen the post on this site and have done everything mentioned in it and it has not resolved anything.

Icon for keyboard layouts

I have two different keyboard layouts that have the same icon. It is nice to be able to see which keyboard layout is currently active by seeing the icon in the taskbar. Is there any way to change the icon (color or anything that will make it look different) ? Thank you

We have completely uninstalled and re-installed the keyboard (even manually removing it from the keyman folders after uninstalling) and placed the icon in the folder mentioned in the above post.

During the re-installation of Keyman 8, I noticed it had an option to upgrade Keyman 6 keyboards. It wouldn’t let us do that since we were not actually upgrading from Keyman 6 but it made me wonder if there is an actual converter that could be used to convert her old Keymany 6 keyboard and see if that resolved the issue?

My understanding is that keyboard icons are actually built into the keyboard. The user doesn’t know how to build keyboards and since it is one originally built back in Keyman 6 or earlier nobody that was involved in building it is still around. I feel there might be unicode characters in the keyboard and not sure if things were built using single unicode characters or combined unicode characters.

Is there someone I could connect with the user (in a remote location on the opposite side of the globe from USA) who could help get this issue resolved for her?

Any advice and more specifically some expert help is appreciated.

[dhigby]

Hi Rusty,

To start with, the latest version of Keyman is 11 and it is free. Start by installing that version, as we would rather not support old versions.

The icon can’t be changed without recompiling the keyboard. You can’t do that without access to the kmn file, so check if that is available.

But even without an icon, users can still select a keyboard since Keyman integrates with the system keyboards in Windows:

You can also use a hotkey to activate a keyboard. Always easier than hunting for an icon. Do this in Keyman configuration, hotkeys.

Lastly, you can configure auto keyboard switching in most SIL software programs.

[Rusty_Riggs]

Doug,

Thanks for the response. This is also what I told the user. It works but the user is not satisfied with the missing icon. I personally do not want to go through the trouble of rebuilding a keyboard I know nothing about and do not have the kmn file to. I will see if I can get the user to accept using it as it is. I will also encourage her to update to the latest Keyman. I fully understand old versions and support.

Thank you very much.

[Lorna]

We do have a tool called kmdecomp which can decompile a compiled .kmx file. It will extract the icon file. I’m not seeing how to download the tool at the moment. If you want it decompiled, feel free to send it to me at the usual sil address (firstname_lastname@sil.org). The source of the resulting .kmn file is not going to be a readable as it might have been originally, but we should be able to recompile it to work on Keyman 11.

[Rusty_Riggs]

Lorna, I’ll see if I can get a copy from the user. They just traveled back to their assignment.

[Marc]

Yes, kmdecomp is not currently available as a binary download although I would like to add it to the Keyman Developer install package as an unsupported utility at some point. The source is in the Keyman repository.