About AvaTai Keyboard Layout When the first Shan/Tai Yai fonts were made, fontmakers placed Tai

letters in the place of a, b, c, etc. This allowed a welcome explosion of publishing in the Tai languages. However, it had the disadvantage of making searches difficult to carry out, since as far as the computer can tell, the letters were Roman the computer had not way to tell when you were typing Shan. As each font placed the Shan characters in place of different letters, it also made life a little more challenging for typists. Unicode, on the other hand, assigns each Shan letter a place, so computers can tell when a word is in Shan. And the keyboard is now no longer linked to the font, so everyone can type using the keyboard they prefer. Keyboards for Mac are easy to make with Ukelele, avaiable for free download from SIL here: http ://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software.asp?id=94 Keyboards for Windows can be made in minutes with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, a free download from Microsoft. The only font I know if which properly implements Unicode 5.1 is Padauk, available at (scripts.sil.org/Padauk), with which you can also type in Burmese with an appropriate keyboard layout. You will also need a Unicode-5.1 compliant word processor, like OpenOffice.org 2.4. To use the keyboard layout, place both AvaTai.keylayout and AvaTai.icns files in ~/ Library/Keyboard Layouts, and log out and log in again. Switch between keyboards by space + command key (right next to the space bar). This keyboard is based on the principle of AvaLaser, i.e., the sound of the Tai character and a roman keyboard. Basic forms are on the lower-case, variant forms are on the capital. So, is on the m, and is on the M. The is on the w, and the on the W. The is on the a, the is on the A, and on the option + a.
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If you haven't used Unicode fonts before, you will have to adjust your style a bit. The initial consonant (or ) always comes first, and items that come before it on the line come after it. So to type first type and then , and for type in roman t R a : Always type the first, and then or While you can always find a character by looking at the Keyboard Viewer, or PopChar ($30 shareware available at versiontracker.com, downloads.com etc). Below are some general notes on placement of characters. 1. the f key is the , the is on the F. The is also on the \ key 2. the j is the 3. is on the o 4. is on the O 5. the number keys give Burmese numerals; to get Shan numbers, shift 6. is found on the q, on the Q 7. is found on the v; the V is 8. is found on the e, as you might guess, but is on the d. Shift to get medial & 9. Most of the characters which are on the shift+# places on Roman keyboards are found at option+# instead, i.e., ! " # % ^ & * ( ) 10. the is on the opt+a, the z, and the C 11. is on the R; is on the Y 12. the space is still the space, but a also a zero-width (breaking) space (Unicode 200B) is on the x, which is handy for allowing lines to break without putting in too many spaces. 13. Some capital letters have been used for common words: L = N = Z = 14. Tone marks are on related punctuation , = ; = : = , . = < = > = 15. There are two punctuation marks. is on ', is on both / and " 16. is on the option + y, $ is on option + s
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