Sunday, May 10, 2009

The Keyboard of Made-Up Languages

Or at least, alternate orthographies.

I took a $10 USB keyboard, popped off the keys, painted some of them with a $1 can of white spray paint, and drew on new characters with a fine-point Sharpie. Aside from the spray-painted keys, lots of other keys have been rearranged to preserve functionality and for other reasons: the numpad is arranged like a phone keypad rather than a computer numpad. Ukulele helped me create Unicode keyboard layouts.

The keyboard types Quikscript for Thoth Uni, and my english mode for cyrillic (mostly because I was working on it around the same time). The position of the cyrillic letters mostly match the Quikscript letters.

It took a little fine-tuning, and repositioning some of the control keys was pointless, because Ukulele can't remap all of them. But it's interesting.

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