Keyboard help

[Steve_White]

Is the standard to document the keyboard help in a php file, or in the welcome.html, or both?

[drowe]

Both.

The welcome.htm file and any other files (such as keyboard images) it references provide the help packaged with the keyboard. The php (often largely a copy/paste from the body of the welcome.htm file, plus a header) provides the help that is available online at the keyman.com site.

[Marc]

The php has one slight advantage over the welcome.htm: it can make use of KeymanWeb to generate the on screen keyboard.

For example, in the sil_jarai keyboard source, the <div id='osk'> element inserts a set of On Screen Keyboard representations for the modifier states enumerated in data-states. The pattern is similar for <div id='osk-tablet'> and <div id='osk-phone'>:

<h2>Desktop Keyboard Layout</h2>
<div id='osk' data-states='default shift rightalt '>
</div>

<h2>Mobile/Tablet Keyboard Layout</h2>

<p>
	To stay on the Shift layer, double tap on the Shift key.
</p>

<div id='osk-tablet' data-states='default shift alt'>
</div>

Whereas, welcome.htm doesn’t have access to KeymanWeb, so the presentation of the keyboard is, in this case, using images (other keyboards may use generated html, which is hard to maintain):

  <h2>Desktop layout</h2>
	<h3>Default (unshifted)</h3>
	<p><a href="desktop_layoutU_.png"><img width="100%" class="keyboard" src="desktop_layoutU_.png" alt="Default (unshifted) state" /></a></p>
	<h3>Shift</h3>
	<p><a href="desktop_layoutU_S.png"><img width="100%" class="keyboard" src="desktop_layoutU_S.png" alt="Shift state" /></a></p>
	<h3>AltGr (Right Alt)</h3>
	<p><a href="desktop_layoutU_RA.png"><img width="100%" class="keyboard" src="desktop_layoutU_RA.png" alt="AltGr (right Alt) state" /></a></p>

Perhaps we should consider embedding KeymanWeb into Keyman for Windows, just so we can generate these on screen keyboards!