First, I just wanna say huge thanks for Keyman!
For the past week, we have our first Javanese Script Congress in Indonesia. This is a landmark in our country where we have hundreds of languages, dozens of scripts, but none of them are regulated or standardized. For the past 3 years several prominent people and the local government trying to held this congress, which was scheduled last year, but was postponed for the reason I’m sure we are all aware of.
March 22-26th [coincide with the launch of Keyman 14], effectively 4 days of congress, our group was tasked with standardization of keyboard for Javanese script and regulations regarding fonts. The organizer was mostly preoccupied with font regulations and didn’t came prepared with any draft for standard keyboard layout (I suspected they were gonna go with whatever layout is available in the market, and choose one).
Fortunately, with the help of Keyman, I was able to do a quick mockup to be presented in day 1; day 1 was mostly talking and ratifying the draft proposal related to fonts. At the end of day 1, based on the input that I gave that day, I was asked to present some standard keyboard layout proposal for the next day. I did that on day 2, and based on the initial mockup, several more people suggested their preferred layouts. I received their suggestions, and by noon, I presented one alternative from my initial mockup, and 3 other alternatives from the group members, for a total of 5 alternatives. At the end of the day, I was able to send everyone with the Keyman files, for them to peruse.
On the next day, the 3rd day, initially we planned to come up with the best alternative between the 5 options and declare it to be the standard before noon, but negotiations dragged out till evening, with many people still trying to make last minute changes to the orderings. With Keyman’s powerful GUI, I was able to make the visualization change-by-change and minute-by-minute, I presented the updated layout alternatives that I crudely screenshot from my computer. Based on those visualization, they can imagine and mock typing in their mobile device and imagine what it would be like in physical keyboard. Before the end of day 3, we finally managed to come to a consensus of the standard keyboard layout for Javanese Script. And we’re all very happy and proud about this.
On day 4, I was able to give everyone the working keyboard for Keyman that they can all try in their multi-devices. And before the closing ceremony of the congress, many among the 1000 delegates and guests have had their hand in the final version of the standard keyboard layout. This is compared to several other keyboard developer still taking some time before they can publish the layout in other apps and software. Everyone was ecstatic. On the subsequent days, I manage to improve the basic keyboard with features that I’ve already familiar with, like long-press, and adding more layers (Latin letters), and rotating keys. Just in the span of less than one week, I’ve made dozens of iterations and put them up in my github page for people to download at their convenience.
Without the help of Keyman, none of this would be possible, and we might end up with subpar layout at best, and faulty layout at worst. So, on behalf of all Javanese script users, I would like to say thank you again to SIL and all the Keyman devs for this excellent product!
