About This Project
Inspiration
The inspiration for this project came from seeing Ilya Birman's Typography Keyboard Layout on Smashing Magazine, a blog for visual artists.
From Smashing Magazine:
The main idea was to provide the web design community with a handy tool that would let designers enter characters that are usually unavailable on a keyboard easier and quicker. If you already tried to enter such words like na?ve or r?sum? or used special symbols (trademark symbol �) or pay attention to punctuation (en-dash, em-dash, hyphen etc.) and diacritics (accents, cedillas, etc.), you probably know what we mean.
I became enamored by it as a designer and an illustrator. However, I am also a mathematician and immediately saw the potential in sciences.
How It Works
A font contains a multitude of characters (letters and symbols) and each one has a unicode associated with it.
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent representation and manipulation of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. � wikipedia.org
It's the reason why you can switch between Times New Roman and Arial Narrow in Microsoft Word or why it doesn't matter what font this text is in. It's a separation of content and its presentation.
I found some charts of characters and their codes for reference and began working.
imagine four pages of just this
Process
I began by recreating a keyboard in Adobe Illustrator and then printed it out. I tried to approach the location of the symbols as intuitively as I could and eventually ported my scribbles back into Illustrator and this is what I ended up with:
my proposed "beta" (β) layout
The next step was to print this out and add a code to each symbol using the reference charts mentioned earlier. During this part of the story, I had something like this:
looks more complicated than it actually is
Then I downloaded Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (free) and starting with the English (US) layout as the foundation, I began to fill out the two states:
- 1) Alt + Ctrl or Right Alt
- 2) Alt + Ctrl + Shift or Right Alt + Shift
Here is the keyboard layout in its four states:
1) small letters and numbers
2) capital letters and basic symbols
3) some greek letters (small) and math symbols
4) some greek letters (capital) and more math symbols
...and in the end I got something that I use all the time when taking lecture notes on my laptop in my classes.
Download Now Self-Extracting Executable (EXE, 281 KB)
When you have downloaded the file, just double click it and click the Extract button.
Set-Up Instructions
Go into the freshly extracted mkbeta folder and then
- Double click setup.exe to install the layout.
- You will presented with a successful install message.
- Click Close to exit the installation.
- Then you must enable it:
Windows XP
- Open Control Panel (through Start or My Computer)
- Open Regional and Language Options
- Select Languages tab
- Click Details...
- Choose English (United States) - BETA | typographic keyboard for mathematicians as the Default input language
- Click OK to close the window
- Click OK to close the Regional and Language Options window
Windows Vista & Windows 7
- Open Control Panel (through Start or My Computer)
- Open Clock, Language, and Region
- Click Change keyboards or other input methods
- Click Change keyboards...
- Choose English (United States) - BETA | typographic keyboard for mathematicians as the Default input language
- Click OK to close the window
- Click OK to close the Region and Language window
You might have to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.
Usage Instructions
WARNING You must understand the fundamental idea behind this: I am simply giving you direct access to characters that represent certain codes. Not all fonts have all the possible characters but the most popular fonts like Times New Roman and Arial feature a great number of them. Therefore you may encounter moments when certain symbols are not showing up even though others are.
To test your new keyboard layout
Open Notepad and then press and hold Ctrl+Alt keys or the Right-Alt key and press the m key to type μ.
you should see something like this if everything went well
Like I said earlier, I tried to approach this very intuitively to make typing easy. I've been using this for a few months now so I'm very familiar with which key is mapped to which symbol.
However, I do recommend downloading this handy cheat sheet (PDF, 443 KB) and printing it out to use the top half as a reference. If you're not happy with the current layout, fill it out in the bottom half, scan it in, and email your own layout to me through the email provided.
P.S.
I have tested it in XP, Vista, and 7 and it works in all three. HOWEVER
Windows behaves really weird by switching to the original keyboard sometimes so my advice is to just remove it (don't worry, you can add it back later if you want). Open up the window for changing keyboards (follow the steps in the Set-Up section) and in the Installed Services half of the window, find US under Keyboard and click the Remove button on the right. (You would add it back in by clicking the Add button.)
yeah, you don't really need it anymore
Thank you!
As I continue to work on this project, your +1 to my sample size is greatly appreciated.
Your input will help me determine the conditions under which mKβ works or doesn't.
Statistics
All the data submitted (from feedback section) is stored in a file that can be accessed in R with the following command:
feedback = read.table("http://mpopov.com/mathkeys/feedback-db2010plus.txt",header=T)
attach(feedback)
Future of Project
First, my goal is to make sure that it works for everybody regardless of their operating system or program. This means that eventually I want to support Mac OS X, Ubuntu, and other popular Linux distributions as well as multiple languages.
Then, I want to branch out into various subjects and offer keyboard layouts tailored to physicists, biologists, chemists, pure mathematicians, engineers, statisticians, etc.
Last, if this project is successful, I want to start creating stickers for keyboards (in the same way that a person can overlay a second language on top of their keyboard) with the symbols and also offer actual keyboards with the symbols printed on them (in the same way that you can buy a bi-lingual keyboard).