Philippines Scripts Keyboard For Linux

Basicaly, I’m not a native user of the Philippines scripts. My projects mostly dealing with the Sundanese script and manuscript. Somehow I’m interested to explore more Southeast Asian scripts out of Indonesia. Philippines scripts are my next goal to learn and master. Recently I’m using the Xubuntu based on Focal Fossa (20.04). For my current project regarding the availability of the preinstalled Google’s Noto fonts, the Xubuntu (and other latest distros) works flawless in terms of rendering and typing. I can also customize any keyboard layout through m17n library, beside using the KMFL (Keyboard Mapping For Linux).

With the flexibility of customization on the Linux, I managed to make the input method for typing the local script in Phillippines, including Baybayin (ᜊᜌ᜔ᜊᜌᜒᜈ᜔), Buhid (ᝊᝓᝑᝒᝇ), Tagbanwa (ᝦᝤᝪᝨᝯ), and Hanunuo (ᜱᜨᜳᜨᜳᜢ). I’m aware that there are several keyboard layouts for the Baybayin script depend on their developers convention. I’m trying to crawl from the basic keyboard design with the available code-points based on the Unicode Standard 13.0.

I put the project on my GitHub repository. You can jump to this Philippine Script Keyboards repo to try the input method. This project is still on progress, so there still may be some changes. I’m pleased to hear any suggestion to develop the keyboard layout. Here is the sample of using the Baybayin script on my Xubuntu Linux. 🙂

My first draft for the Baybayin (ᜊᜌ᜔ᜊᜌᜒᜈ᜔) keyboard layout looks like this.