Guarani/Keyboard

This page of the wiki documents the creation of a keyboard for Guarani. It covers the state of existing resources for a Guarani keyboard, and explains the justifications behind my decisions for the keyboard layout. Instructions for download and installation can be found at the bottom of the page.

Existing Resources

• There doesn't seem to be a widely-used, dedicated Guarani keyboard. A few articles mention that a Guarani keyboard is being developed, but I wasn't able to find any documentation or links to the keyboard. However, I was able to found a download link to a keyboard made by a user in a Guarani translation Google group.[1]This keyboard is similar to the Latin American layout, but with nasalized letters added to the 3rd and 4th keys of their corresponding non-nasal key. In that same Google group, people had mentioned that SwiftKey (a subsidiary of Microsoft that works on Android keyboards) was interested in working on a keyboard for Guarani.
• Most of Paraguay uses either the Latin American layout or the Spanish layout. Because there is no way to type the nasals, the circumflex is sometimes used in its place.

Justification

I used the Latin American Keyboard layout as a guideline for the Guarani keyboard, as it will be familiar with most Paraguayan users. The main issue with the Latin American keyboard is that besides the character ñ, which is included in the Latin American layout, there is no way to type Guarani's nasalized letters (ã, ẽ, g̃, ĩ, ñ, õ, and ỹ). To get around this, I initially changed the Latin American diacritic dead key to be a nasal dead key. However, I found out that the nasal dead key works fine with vowels, but does not work with consonants, so I was still unable to type g̃ and ỹ. I decided to change the diacritic dead key to be a nasal compose key, as the nasal compose key works with any letter. I moved the nasal dead key to the upper case, because it would still be useful when typing nasalized vowels.

Additionally, I decided to add the nasalized forms of the letters to the third and fourth level of their corresponding non-nasal key (E.g. a and ã). Because there is no Unicode character for g̃, I included the circumflex ĝ, which is often used as a substitute for g̃, to the third and fourth level of the g. This means that the traditional nasalized g -- g̃ -- can only be typed using the compose key.

License

• This keyboard is licensed under an MIT License. For more information, go to my github.