Testing Keyboards

The main directories in the keyboards/ directory are:

All but /und/ are designed to reflect what is available on a particular platform, and are derived mechanically. Changes to those need to be requested of the platform vendors. Any keyboard files that are intended for a given platform, but are not “official” on that plaform will go into /und/.

Keyboard data that is not supported on a given platform, but intended for use with that platform, may be added to the directory /und/. For example, there could be a file /und/lt-t-k0-chromeos.xml, where the data is intended for use with ChromeOS, but does not reflect data that is distributed as part of a standard ChromeOS release.

We have found that most submissions have data errors which prevent our adding the keyboard files, and we don't have the resources to do a back-and-forth to fix them manually. We are thus dependent on the submitter running the tests, which means setting up CLDR locally so that the tooling can be run.

So in the ticket, the submitter must indicate that:

  1. the new keyboards are intended to go into /und/, and

  2. they have passed those tests.

We intend to develop an online tool to make this easier, but that is not yet in place.

Running the test

If you don't have CLDR tools set up, the easiest way is to start with Eclipse Setup.

Once it is all set up, add the new keyboard under und/. Make sure that the id for the keyboard is correct according to bcp47 with extension -t-, and matches the file name, and that the other lines in the file are well-defined according to LDML Keyboards. The keyboard id must be different than all of the platform keyboard ids, so it might be something like “lt-t-k0-osx-xvar”.

Run ShowKeyboards.java, which reads all the keyboard files and writes out the charts. Use the option ? to see the options you can supply. (For example, you can supply a regex to filter the ids to just the added keyboard.)

Fix any errors in the new XML file, and iterate until the tool runs without errors. Examine the resulting charts for the new keyboard, and make sure they match the intent of the file.