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This is a copy of Simos Xenitellis just for easy reference in case his website goes offline.

The Keyboard Layout Editor (KLE) is an application that allows you to create keyboard layouts for the X.Org server, commonly found in the Linux, OpenSolaris, *BSD, etc Desktops.

My mentor was Sergey Udaltsov, maintainer of xkeyboard-config, the Keyboard Indicator applet in GNOME, supporting libraries for keyboard layouts and much more. I had great help and Sergey was very supportive. Highly recommended mentor for your GSoC’09 project.

The screenshot above shows the main window of the program; a keyboard with blank layout (keys are empty), a section Add to layout with items that can be used to populate the layout, and a section for the description of the layout (Layout details).

There are typically two workflows; first you start off with a blank layout and you add Unicode characters, dead keys, include files, then you save.

The other workflow is to start with an appropriate existing layout as a base, then add more characters, make changes, etc.

It might be strange to talk about different workflows, but in terms of usability it’s important provide assistance for such cases. For example, having tooltips is important when a person starts off with a new layout.

Here we started with a blank layout; we click on Start Character Map, then locate the characters you need, and drag and drop them to the appropriate keys. Each key is composed of four parts, and we number these from 1 to 4. The way we count is quite peculiar,

1. bottom left, when you press the key as is (key)
2. top left, when you press the key with Shift (Shift + key)
3. bottom right, when you press the key with AltGr (AltGr + key)
4. top right, when you press the key with Shilft+AltGr (Shift + AltGr + key)

This is my entry to the most engineered diagram competition.

The dead keys relate to diacritic marks such as grave and acute. Since they are too small to see, we present them next to a D letter (D for Dead key). In some cases I could not find a character equivalent to the diacritic mark, so I put ?, therefore it looks like D?. If you put the mouse pointer over the key, you can see the full details in the tooltip.

In many cases, there exist layouts/variants that contain most of the characters you want to add. In this case, you add and enable in the Include files section. You can then override any of those characters by dragging and dropping to the layout.

At this stage in the blog post, it is important to clarify the notions of a layout and a variant. The two are quite similar and the distinction is messy when trying to explain to the end-user. The French layout file is fr, which contains several variants (distinct groups of mappings of physical keys to Unicode characters). When you are actually talking about a French keyboard layout, you are actually referring to the default variant of the «fr» file. Oftentimes people refer to the «fr» file as a whole as the French layout. You can also pick a non-default variant of the layout file, and call it your layout.

The way I would like to define layout and variant is this: a layout refers to the default variant of the layout file. This is consistent to the fact that distributions pick the default variant in the settings so it’s what get the most visibility, or when users select a new layout, they are presented with the default setting first. Regarding layouts in general, it is important for different languages/scripts to make effort that the default layout is updated and includes extra useful and relevant characters.

This is the updated Greek keyboard layout, and is the near-final version that we are planning to submit to xkeyboard-config. It adds Greek Polytonic to the existing Greek layout. It does not make changes to the previous default layout, so users will not be unpleasantly surprised. It also adds all sort of characters that are found in the Greek Unicode block.

In this post I simplified some of the terms/description. If I went a bit too far, please correct me and I’ll update in-place.