Updating Adinkra font on Keyman keyboard repository

Hello All,

We are working on Adinkra keyboard and would like to update the Adinkra font at Keyman with the standardized Adinkra font. Could someone help us update the Adinkra font at this repository
@ GitHub - adinkraalphabet/keyboards at 0dc495c24b6c7a7656aa681c9dab16a7a33b49c8

Thank you

Charles

Hi Charles. It’s good to hear you are updating a font! I went to look at your repo. It looks like you have not kept it up-to-date with the Keyman repo (looks like you pulled 8 years ago…and it has changed enormously since then). I think first of all you should Sync it. If you do it from the web it looks like this on mine (Where you “Sync fork” and then “Update branch”:

If you use Sourcetree you can Fetch and then Pull.

If you work from the command line you

git checkout master
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master
git push origin master

That would get your files into better shape. If you run into merge conflicts you may find it easier to just delete your repo and reclone it.

Now, I don’t think your keyboard is in the Keyman repo yet. Is that correct?

Adinkra is not encoded in Unicode yet, so we will want it to go in the experimental section rather than in release. If the filename/foldernames of the keyboard are adinkra, then you would put it in experimental/a/adinkra. Within that folder you might have:

experimental/a/adinkra/adinkra.kpj
experimental/a/adinkra/README.md
experimental/a/adinkra/HISTORY.md
experimental/a/adinkra/LICENSE.md
experimental/a/adinkra/assets/adinkra.ttf
experimental/a/adinkra/assets/LICENSE.txt
experimental/a/adinkra/source/adinkra.kmn
experimental/a/adinkra/source/adinkra.kps
experimental/a/adinkra/source/adinkra.kvks
experimental/a/adinkra/source/adinkra.ico
experimental/a/adinkra/source/readme.htm
experimental/a/adinkra/source/welcome.htm
experimental/a/adinkra/source/help/adinkra.php

In the .kps is where you include the font to be distributed. I looked at the font in your repo and there is no license in the font. In order for us to include your font in the Keyman repo it must be licensed under a freely distributable font license such as the Open Font License. It cannot be freeware with no license, but “GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE” would also be acceptable. I see the font is using Private Use Area codepoints. That is the right thing to do. We wouldn’t want to have a font that reuses other codepoints that represents something else.

This is a very helpful page to read: GitHub - keymanapp/keyboards: Open Source Keyman keyboards

Also, you can go through this tutorial:
https://help.keyman.com/developer/17.0/guides/develop/tutorial/

One last thing, in your repo I see some files in the root of the keyboards folder for Adinkra. As you will see above, they don’t belong in the root. Those are from 7 years ago, so I’m sure you aren’t talking about those files. You should just remove those. The name of them adinkra_alphabet_keyboard isn’t really appropriate. You shouldn’t include the word alphabet or keyboard in a keyboard name. It’s kind of redundant and the shorter name is best. The name you choose will be in the URL for the rest of time.

I hope this is helpful. Feel free to reach out again if you need assistance.

1 Like

Great! Good to hear from you also, Lorna. I am working with Oreen Yousuf from Unicode. I have sync the fork and discarded the outdated changes. We will commit the updated changes when we are ready. Thank you very much for your help and for the detailed step by step instructions.

Hi Lorna,

I just uploaded the updated files. I tried to do them in the order you suggested above. Please check out them when you have a chance and let me know if you require any changes or additional files. Thank you once again for making the process easy to follow.

Hi Charles. I was waiting for you to submit a pull request on the keymanapp/keyboards repo. I haven’t seen it yet. So, I went to your repo and I do see you’ve done some work, but not committed a pull request. I do see some issues you’ll need to resolve before submitting it though.

If you look at the file structure I listed above, you’ll see that you need to commit all the source files. That includes these file:

experimental/a/adinkra/adinkra.kpj
experimental/a/adinkra/source/adinkra.kmn
experimental/a/adinkra/source/adinkra.kps
experimental/a/adinkra/source/adinkra.kvks
experimental/a/adinkra/source/adinkra.ico

The source files ARE needed, but the compiled .kmp file should NOT be committed.
Also, the folder name should be a lowercase “a” as in adinkra and not Adinkra.

Hope this helps. If you need help in actually submitting a Pull Request you can start here:
https://help.keyman.com/developer/keyboards/github/step-1

Hi Lorna,

Sounds good. I will do the corrections and get back to you.
Thank you.

Charles