Keyboard Studio — What to Expect

• Begin from a keyboard close to your language — any published Keyman keyboard can be your starting point — or from plain US English if nothing close exists yet.
• Type your language's name and the studio fills in the rest: its script, its own name for itself, and its language code.
• Paste a paragraph of your language and your alphabet is proposed for you, drawn from large public collections of language data (known as CLDR and SLDR) that together cover thousands of languages.
• Every character shows where it came from — your text, the language data, or the starting keyboard — and you confirm or correct the list before anything is built on it.

• A step-by-step survey in plain language about your characters and how they behave — no technical vocabulary, nothing to memorise.
• Every question arrives already filled in with a sensible proposal. You confirm it or change it — you never start from a blank page.
• Change your mind freely. If you switch your starting keyboard later, your answers are kept and re-checked against the new start — never silently thrown away.

• Live mini-keyboards, built from your letters. Where a behaviour can be shown, you tap the pattern that behaves the way your language should — you don't have to imagine it from a description.
• The studio rebuilds and checks your keyboard after every answer. It stops you only when something would actually break — not for harmless choices.
• Problems are flagged at the exact step where you can fix them, in words about your language, where you are standing when you read them.

• A dedicated “Accents & marks” step sits right after your alphabet, while the letters are fresh in your mind.
• Decide for each mark whether it gets its own key or combines with the letter before it — and whether it is typed before or after its letter. Both answers can live in one alphabet: a busy tone mark on its own key, and the two most common combined letters on keys of their own.
• Interactive demos use your letters, not toy examples, so what you tap is what your community will type.
• You also choose how backspace behaves with combined characters — peel one piece at a time, or remove the whole character.
• The studio tells the truth about what your keyboard can type — on phone keyboards included, where marks live on keys like ◌̀.

• The touch layout for phones is shaped from the keyboard you just designed — never a fixed template that ignores your work.
• Your choice: keep the starting keyboard's phone layout, or rebuild it from your desktop design.
• The studio itself works on a phone-sized screen, so you can build or adjust a keyboard from the same device your community uses.
• The studio's own screens speak English and French today, with more languages prepared through community translation.

• Download an installable keyboard package for your community, or the full source files if you want them.
• Every package arrives complete — a readme, a licence, a history, a welcome page and a help page, generated for you — and you preview them before you download.
• “My keyboards” keeps every project in one place. Your drafts are saved as you work and survive closing the browser; come back tomorrow and resume where you left off.
• A keyboard you have shared is marked as shared, with its link kept, so you always know what the world can already see.

• Scripts: the proven path covers the Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian and Armenian alphabetic scripts. Ethiopic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean writing systems are not supported yet.
• Copying an existing keyboard can still lose some polish — a font or a welcome picture may go missing from the copy. The team is fixing these right now; check your package's welcome page and fonts before you share it.
• There is no built-in tutorial and no finished user manual yet. This page is the guide for now — and the studio's questions are written to be answered without one.
• The studio is young. Expect it to change: screens may move, and new stops will appear on this map as they open.

• Write your keyboard's welcome and help text inside the studio, in your own words, instead of accepting generated pages.
• Design your keyboard's icon — the little picture your community will recognise it by.
• Bring a keyboard you already have as source files and adapt it, even if it was never published anywhere.
• A guided first-time walkthrough, for authors opening the studio for the very first time.
• Better preview fonts, including Andika, and coverage for scripts the standard fonts miss — so what you see while designing is what your letters really look like.
• For confident authors, an assisted editor for fine-tuning the rules directly — still without raw code.

The promise: you will not face the review process alone, and you will never be asked to learn Git.

• “Defaults are proposals.”

  The studio suggests; you decide. Nothing it fills in for you is final until you have seen it and let it stand.

• “Nothing silent.”

  If the studio changes its mind about something of yours, it asks — showing you the change — rather than quietly rewriting your work.

• “Warnings live where you can act.”

  A problem is flagged at the step that owns it, in plain words — not collected into a scary list somewhere else.

• “Your work is yours.”

  Drafts stay until you delete them. And a copy never steals the original author's words as your description — your keyboard's story is yours to write.

• “Your data has a named keeper.”

  The studio's privacy notice names SIL Global as responsible for personal data — and reporting a crash never includes your text unless the design says so.

Requests and ideas: they land as issues on the project's GitHub — there is no separate feedback forum. That is where an ask arrives, and where its landing is recorded.