Hello. I am very new to all this, so please bear with me: I am looking for help properly installing the touch keyboard I’ve been developing. It seems I can download the layout for the physical and on-screen keyboards effectively on my Windows 10 OS, but I cannot seem to access the touch screen keyboard. To be clear, I am not well versed in the terminology, rules, or coding associated with Keyman Developer, so please be patient with me if I have trouble catching on or explaining the issue throroughly enough. I have not used the coding directly in making my keyboards, instead relying on manual set-up methods. The package I have made contains a file for the touch keyboard layout, but it will not open. If anyone can help me with resolving this issue, I would very greatly appreciate it! Thanks in advance!
Hi David, welcome to the community!
In response to your request just now, I went back to fill in some missing pieces of our Developer course. You should find what you need in this course: https://lingtran.net/Keyman-Developer-Course
And, specifically about touch on this sub-page: https://lingtran.net/6-Create-a-Touch-Keyboard
@David_Myers, I’m not clear from your description if you are expecting the touch keyboard on Windows 10. Keyman’s touch keyboards are available currently on iPhone/iPad and Android devices only – not on Windows (except in the test environment in Keyman Developer).
Thank you very much for the quick and helpful response! I believe this has clarified the matter for me.
Hi, and thank you for providing this clarification! I was under the (apparently mistaken) impression that because I have a computer that has touch screen capabilities and can fold backwards to act like a tablet, and which has a “tablet mode,” I would be able to apply the touch keyboard to my Windows 10 OS for use with a particular font (mapped to Unicode slots) that I have been creating for use on MS Word. But, as you say, and as I’ve now seen elsewhere, this is not the case. By any chance, are there plans that you know of to extend touch keyboard capabilities to systems like mine in the future? I do have the physical and on-screen keyboards in any case, and I can use my computer’s touch capabilties to make use of the standard touch keyboard that comes with the system. However, particularly for the long–press feature, I would definitely be interrested in discovering a way around my current limitations with respect to installing the touch keyboard from Keyman which I have been developing for this purpose.
If you know of any such ways around this that exist now or will in the future, please do feel free to make me aware of them. Regardless, thank you for informing me of the current scenario!
Microsoft have not made it possible to extend the built-in touch keyboard. Furthermore, we have not yet found any documented or supported method of replacing the built-in touch keyboard completely. We believe it may be possible to ‘trick’ the built-in touch keyboard into hiding and then showing our keyboard in its place, but this is a significant amount of work, and given it would only work ‘by accident’ from Microsoft’s point of view, is likely to break when Microsoft provide updates to Windows.
So for this reason, we have been asking Microsoft to make it possible to replace the built-in touch keyboard, but they don’t see it as a priority. For the time being, we don’t have a great way forward for this.
Okay, well thanks for letting me know about that in any case.