I have created some private characters using Windows Private Character Editor, but I want to be able to have the keyboard type my characters based on what I want the keys to type, but every program I find, it has no Private Character functionality... What do i do?
Without knowing your ultimate goal or restrictive parameters I can only give you a couple suggestions that come to mind but which may or may not be useful to you & your situation.
You could create a keyboard layout with the free Microsoft tool. It is able to access & assign private use characters. (Copy & paste the glyph from the Character Map to your custom key map.)
MS Keyboard Layout Tool
You could replace other characters/glyphs from another language which you do not use with your characters in a font making sure that the characters you replace are accessible through an already available keyboard.
Related
I would like to make my own version of Mac's ABC-Extended keyboard for typing Pinyin (a way to write Mandarin that indicates tones). But when I use Xcode, I just see a target custom keyboard extension for iOS and nothing for macOS. I've looked into the program Ukulele but it doesn't seem like it will do everything I need. Theoretically I could also put my rules into files like how this article indicates but that also seems cumbersome based on what I want my keyboard to do.
Here's what I want it to do:
First option: user literally types "ni3 hao3" and my logic in real time changes their output to "nǐ hǎo" (there are pinyin/grammar rules for where the tone mark goes)
Secondly (phase 2 in my project), in their user settings for the keyboard, they could indicate they want to convert their text to Hanzi (the characters). So when they type their Pinyin, my algorithm guesses a best guess list of Hanzi characters that matches their Pinyin entry. This would require that I have a downloaded dictionary file for my keyboard.
Thanks for any help! I know how to program it I just need the right software to use :(
I would like to ask for some help with firstly how to define the windows keys "Alt+Tab" and "Enter" key when using an online barcode generator like https://barcode.tec-it.com/en. Alternatively, if there isn't a way to define the keyboard commands, is there a place that I can find these commands in the form of Barcodes? Code-128 is preferred.
Thank you
Barcodes simply contain ASCII (or with more modern 2d symbols) UTF-8 character codes. So standard keyboard values such as Enter and Tab that correspond to ASCII values can be encoded in a barcode.
On the other hand, dedicated barcode scanners that attach via USB are essentially keyboard emulators. And those can be programmed to create Alt and Ctrl key sequences.
Unfortunately, I do not know of any scanner makers that support Alt-Tab. Most programmable scanners can create Alt-A ... Alt-Z but not Alt-Tab.
Additionally, most barcode scanners allow you to define prefix and suffix key codes to send when a barcode is scanned. The most common configuration is to send Enter or Tab after each scanned barcode. This is done by programming the scanner, not in the barcode.
I have a Firefox extension written in XUL. It takes a hotkey. I want to have an input field where the user can press any key and I can programmatically determine what key was pressed.
I don't care about key combos which have meta meanings inside the OS (I don't need to capture Ctrl + Alt + Del).
If the key is already defined by Firefox, I'm OK with not capturing it (for instance, if the user presses F1 and help pops up instead of the key being captured, I'm fine).
I would also love to have some way to determine programmatically whether the key pressed already has some other meaning inside of Firefox, but that is likely out of scope for this request. I just mention it in case it's easy.
My current solution, which seems to have been adopted by a number of add-ons, is to provide a text box where the user can type a printable character and then a series of check boxes for modifier keys. This solution is barely workable but terrible for a number of reasons (it doesn't allow users to use non-printing keys such as function keys in their combos, it allows the user to input invalid characters (such as Unicode characters with no physical key on the keyboard), and it's just awkward to use).
Thanks!
You can use Inline Options
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Inline_Options
You can detect the key pressed in the text input and write your modifiers like accel or alt.
Source example:
http://git.io/vez1o
When extracting strings from a desktop Windows application for translation, should I translate shortcut keys as well?
In other words, should Ctrl-C copy to the clipboard even for Chinese software?
Yes, CTRL-C is universal. You can safely assume that typical CTRL-something shortcuts behave the same in all (modern) Windows versions, regardless of the language.
However, there might be several ways to present them depending on the language. For example, French would translate the name of the key (the combination remains the same).
But you are asking about Chinese (presumably Simplified Chinese), which will simply display it as CTRL-C. After all, the keyboard layout is the same (with the same symbols), all they do differently is they use so-called Input Method Editors. And although there are several different IMEs, I haven't yet seen the one that would override CTRL-C...
I'm on Windows (Win32). Imagine I typed a key 'K' in the US/UK Layout and ANSI Charset. I want to find out what the char it would be if the key is the same, but layout is Russian and Charset is the corresponding. So in other words I want implement automatic wrong layout detection/fixing using only Windows API (without prior knowledge of any language)
This sounds like a job for the Keyboard Convert Service.