Guys, need help.
Trying to create a keyboard for ios and android for a conlang. In my mind it should be pretty simple, its basically latin letters with a custom made font, which makes them look different.
Can someone give me a short guide or a link to one on how to make it work? Im not that much of a programmer, thus this task has turned out to be quite difficult.
Much apreciated.
Hi,
You can go as simple or complex as you want, but your keyboard for a conlang shouldn’t be vastly different from a traditional language. You’ll need to package the font with the keyboard, and select it for display in the touch keyboard. Unfortunately, the text may not be usable in common mobile apps (Google, Facebook, Gmail, etc.) that don’t have your custom font. This will be a challenge on mobile (fonts are easy to install on computers), unless you are making an App to go with it and display the text.
There is lots of documentation here:
https://help.keyman.com/developer/
and some here.
LingTranSoft Wiki | Keyman
There are tons of example keyboards here:
GitHub - keymanapp/keyboards: Open Source Keyman keyboards
Here’s a video course (with a focus on touch keyboards)
Keyman Developers Workshop 2020 - Keyman Multiplatform Keyboards on Vimeo
Try those out in Keyman Developer, and let us know if you run into issues.
-M
But if i want to use it in common messenger, like iMessage or Viber and the recipient also has the same keyboard installed - will it work properly?
Чт, 6 мая 2021 г. в 22:35, Matthew Lee via SIL Software <software_community@sil.org>:
While it is possible, with some work, to install fonts on iPhone, that will then be available to all apps, it is not generally possible to install fonts on Android devices in the same way. So conlang scenarios are difficult unless you make your own Android and iPhone app to work with them, and then of course you still can’t use common messaging apps like iMessage or Viber.
Generally, on mobile devices, it will be hard work and users have to be motivated to do it 
But isnt it what keyman actually promises, that you can add any keyboard and use it in any app? Or did i get the ad wrong?
You certainly can create the keyboard. But full language support is more than a keyboard. We do what we can but we just can’t control what Apple and Google decide to restrict on their platforms – and font installation is just one of those things.
We do have a feature request to allow for font registration on iOS, but even with that, there are limitations, particularly for writing systems that are not in the Unicode standard – which includes conlangs.