International Keyboard Handbook: Creating new National Keyboard
Description: KDE International Keyboard
Keywords: KDE multilanguage X11

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### 5. Creating new National Keyboard

All system keyboard files stores in $KDEDIR/share/apps/kikbd and personal in $HOME/.kde/share/apps/kikbd. Keyboard identified by it file name without .kimap extension. File in personal directory hide system one with same file name (not label).

To creating new keyboard you should get one of the existing .kimap file as an template. Keyboard file has two major sections.

1. International Keyboard
   In this section the following items can be defined:
   - Authors - list of authors in the format "name last_name < email address>" separated by comma;
   - Comment** - comment for this keyboard;
   - Language** - language this keyboard for;
   - Charset - charset this keyboard for;
   - Locale - locale this keyboard for;
   - Label* - label used by KiKbd to identify this keyboard.
   * - required
   ** - can be translated to other languages

2. KeyboardMap
   This section contains mapping from default symbols to two, three or four new symbols in the form:

           keysym<num> = <default sym>,<sym1>,<sym2>,<sym3>,<sym4>,

   and mapping from key codes to symbols:

           keycode<num> = <key code>,<sym1>,<sym2>,<sym3>,<sym4>,

   Where num means any unique number, sym means symbol in the form of hex decimal number or form interpreted by X, key code means decimal code, default sym means default symbol for this key (before starting KiKbd). First two symbols sym1, sym2 defines national symbols and sym3, sym4 defines alternate symbols. It is preferred to use only keysym definitions.

   As addition you can specify CapsSymbols in this section as a list of Latin symbols separated by comma which KiKbd use for CapsLock emulation.

Then you create and test new keyboard map you can submit it to KDE developers team or directly to author.

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