Hello,
I use a syllabic orthography to do transcription with local speakers (which we use phonemically and later convert to roman). But I recently switched to a mac, and the OS X version of ELAN doesn’t seem to input correctly from the custom keyboard we use. It’s not a font display issue, and I’ve tried two separate keyboards (a custom .layout file and a keyman keyboard) which give different, equally unusable results. In one case, characters randomly double and change order, and in the other case, the characters alternate between the correct script and roman.
I’m running the latest OS X 12.3, and I installed ELAN 6.3-M1. The keyboard I use is at keyman dot com /keyboards/bj_oji_cree
Is this an issue that can be fixed or worked around somehow? Any help would be appreciated,
Just an update –
Apparently this is a known bug with Java. There is discussion on the keyman github,
github dot com /keymanapp/keyman/issues/3935
and there has been an unresolved bug report sitting at Java for four years…
bugs.java dot com /bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=8195675
For me it seems to affect some non-keyman keyboards as well though. I don’t really have the technical knowledge give the Java people details, but it seems to me like this should be a problem worth addressing if ELAN on mac can’t handle certain standard minority language keyboards? It’s been central to our workflow to be able to work collaboratively with indigenous translators in the local orthography.
PS, Sorry about the weird links – the system tells me new users can’t put links in posts
Hello Matt,
Apologies for the delayed response.
You are right, this is a known issue with some of the Keyman keyboards and Java applications (like ELAN).
ELAN receives the characters of the sequence separately instead of the substitution
character. So far we haven’t found a way around this problem; as you already mentioned in your follow up, this should actually and ideally be solved in the Java implementation.
We acknowledge that it is a problem for an application like ELAN that minority language keyboards are not supported, but we don’t have the resources to fix the bigger (Java) problem or to implement e.g. a Keyman compatible alternative in Java. ELAN currently provides input methods for a few scripting systems based on (old) GATE technology. The only thing we could maybe do is to see if (some types of) Keyman keyboards can be converted to GATE’s format and, if so, if we can make it possible (for the user) to add such new keyboards to ELAN. But this would probably still result in a user experience which is falling short, so not sure if this is worth the effort.
PS spam on the forum forced us to restrict the use of links in posts, unfortunately.
Ok, it’s a little disappointing but thanks for explaining!
I have a related question about running ELAN on windows 11 through parallels, but I think that’ll be another topic.
