Yiddish keyboard on Android

Hello, the yiddish keyboard on android only displays with the Hebrew characters despite being designed to closely match a QWERTY layout and allow typing by transliteration of Latin characters. Is there any way (and if not, could it be added) to optionally use the character with the standard QWERTY Latin characters on the keyboard?

I love using this keyboard on my pc, and would like to be able to on mobile as well, but if I’m going to be looking at the Hebrew characters on the keyboard, I might as well just use a Hebrew keyboard layout too. The real strength of this is that it lets you type by transliteration.

Welcome to the community, @Adam_C.

You can (1) take the keyboard source and customize the OSK of the touch layout to look like that of the QWERTY layout or (2) you can choose to have the underlying character shown, i.e.

image

Both option has to be done using Keyman Developer. If you are familiar with it you can customize it yourself, otherwise you might have to file a feature request against the keyboard on Keyman keyboard GitHub repo via create a new issue

On my Windows and Mac machines I use the transliterating feature of the Keyman Pasekh Yiddish keyboard. Many of the Yiddish characters require two Roman character keystrokes: For example, to insert a ש, I type an s and then an h. I type ey to produce ײ, ay for ײַ, kh for כ, etc.

@makara can an Android keyboard work like this? Work like a dead key so the combination of two keystrokes produces a single character in the other language? That would be a fantastic feature but I’ve never seen it on a mobile device keyboard.

When I’m writing in French on my Android phone and I need an ö, i have to long press the o key to bring up a menu to select ô or ö.

Try this (yiddish_pasekh.kmp (39.8 KB)) out and see if you like it. Nothing is changed to the keyboard except making the underlying character visible. You should notice the gray English letter on the top left of each keys, i.e.

That works beautifully! Thank you so much! I really appreciate you taking the time to make this. Does Keyman support one language/keyboard pack having multiple layouts like that? Because I think ideally the yiddish_pasekh keyboard would install both overlays and let the user pick which one they like.
But either way, for my purposes, this solves the issue for me personally perfectly and I’m very grateful to you for taking the time to set it up for me.

You’re welcome, @Adam_C.

I’ve created a feature request for this. Please track it here feat(Android/iOS): a toggle setting to show and unshow underlying characters on the OSK on mobile · Issue #6921 · keymanapp/keyman · GitHub.

Definitely, if the solution above is not what you prefer, feel free to customize the keyboard. Its source lives here: https://github.com/keymanapp/keyboards/tree/master/release/y/yiddish_pasekh.