Oh, I didn’t know that. Hmmm… I personally would still go with full key symbols. Looking at my current keyboard, and the full key symbols look better in my opinion. Looking at the num pad which has . and Del on one key, top/bottom respectively, and I don’t like it as much as the arrow keys that are centered and taking up the whole key.
Hrm. Tried the Mende symbols with a larger fonts - not bad. Will try centering the symbols too, and see where that leads.
I’m not likely to sign off on full-key symbols. The light distribution won’t be even. They won’t look great.
Also, to the extent that we can find symbols with a consistent line width, that’ll also laser better.
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Sounds good. What is best for the size/position of the symbols? Any particular recommendation on line width? I can modify my symbols to match a specific pixel width in the images.
Another update, with both halves full of symbols. I adjusted some a little, to move them towards the LEDs. Still a work in progress, mind you. As this uses a single font, line widths should be reasonably consistent, I hope.
I may rearrange some of the symbols, but when it comes to positioning, this is the best I can do, I think. If anyone wants it, the SVG source is at https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/algernon/keyboardio/runes.svg. You’ll need this font for it to render properly.
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Does the font not have 62 characters? I ask because some of the symbols are re-used.
Another question I have is what everyone else thinks of mirrored halves?
It does, but some of the symbols look very similar. Mind you, if I reused any, that’s a mistake. Except for the thumb arc, that reuse was intentional, but I’ll be changing them, most likely.
Hmm… mirrored sounds intriguing too.
I think the draft layout looks great! I would buy it with only minor tweaks, and since you’re using Unicode and an open font, there should be minimal risk of offending anyone. I do suggest either mirroring the thumb row or making them both unique. Right now, the repeated characters reflect the default keymap’s repeated keys, and I think the consensus has been that we want a layout that privileges no keymap.
Do you prefer the more standardized format of @algernon s font, or the more diverse symbol types in my picture?
That was my thought too. I saw that some characters were re-used in the thumb arc, and that made me think mirrored would look better than partial re-use.
I personally like @algernon’s layout more - the variety of symbols in @adam.ard 's layout, while interesting, is a little too busy for my tastes; I tend to prefer a more subdued & unified style.
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I am thinking the same thing, and am going to look into more uniform options for my 2nd attempt.
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Left side is the Visitors font, right is the Atlantean font. Visitors is more sci-fi, Atlantean is more fantasy, but both have similar thicknesses.
Thoughts?
@adam.ard: I personally like that design very much! I think the left / right split is a nice touch, although I would prefer the symbols to be a bit larger.
Me too! Next version will increase the size.
I like Atlantean a lot more. Visitors is… I don’t know… too simple, or minimal?
How about this? Increased the size of the fonts, moved a couple Atlantean characters around (I want interesting stuff in thumb row), and adjusted the alignment of each character to match the keycap.
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Looks better with the larger font, but the right side has a number of keys with similar symbols: a vertical line with 1, 2 or 3 dots beside it. In the lower right corner, there is two that are just mirrorred horizontally, by the looks of it, and the one above them is very similar too. A bit more variety would be nicer, in my opinion.
The left half seems better in this regard, at least after a quick look. I still like the Atlantean font though, but that’s just a matter of taste.
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I had to do some digging, because the font only has 3 upper case characters, so I was limited in what options I had. The boring characters are the numbers, (need 31 characters, have 26 letters). I found that there are 3 uppercase, I replaced the repetitive looking numbers with the uppercase characters.
EDIT: Also, the left side does have a couple characters that are just rotations of the original (Three lines vertical vs three lines horizontal, horiztonal U with dot, same flipped vertically).
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Sorry, can’t help it, but still like Menda Kikakui more. I would like consistency between the 2 halfs. And Menda Kikakui also looks more modern than the right half.
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