Welcome, fellow JIS user! I have been fighting the good fight on here to try and get increased JIS support, so it would be great to have another voice to add to the chorus!
The good news: I and a few others (notably konstantin) have met with some success persuading people to add JIS support to hiragana/katakana monolegend sets. Some recent examples:
- GMK Masterpiece, which ran a month or so ago, already had good JIS support without any help from us.
- KAT Explosion, which finished yesterday, has almost full JIS support -- it is missing the top-row ー key. The designer, rensuya, has said they will consider including this key in future sets.
- GMK Sumi, which will run its GB starting in two weeks, has good JIS support for its monolegends including top-row ー.
- GMK Shoko has added top-row ー, middle む, and bottom-row ろ to its monolegend kit for JIS support. This is not reflected in the renders in the first post but there is a KLE showing it later in the thread.
- KAT Monochrome includes all the required alphas in its "Hiragana Alphas" kits.
These are just off the top of my head -- there may be more that I have missed. The reason it's so easy to get JIS support on these kits, of course, is that because they are monolegends you don't have to worry about the different punctuation on a JIS board. The result is that you only need three more keys on top of a standard ANSI set in order to get a JIS layout (ignoring 変換 keys for now).
Getting JIS support on a
Latin kit is a much harder proposition, as you've noticed. I think in order to try and achieve this, KAT sets are our best option, since because of the way they handle MOQ, even relatively niche kits contribute to the MOQ for the set as a whole. With that in mind,
I did ask in the KAT Monochrome thread about adding it. JSaintS seemed open to the idea, but has made no promises, and since then the set has exploded with different kits, including some very well-executed non-Latin kits, so I don't know whether there'll be room to add JIS support in there as well. If you are interested in it, though, it would do no harm to comment on that thread saying you want it!
The only kits I'm aware of with good JIS support that aren't kana monolegend sets at present are:
- SimpleJA, which you've mentioned. I believe ai03's next set will also have good JIS support; join their discord for the inside scoop on that.
- /dev/tty. This is quite comprehensive and seems to run fairly regularly on Drop.
- Uh... I think that's it, actually.
The only way this will change is by people who actually want to use it requesting it, and then actually buying the kits ;-). It's a numbers game; a few years ago ISO and NorDe were seen as niche problems that very few boards would support, but now the support seems to be much more widespread (although by no means universal). The other problem is that people just don't know what's required for good JIS support, since there aren't many good examples we can point to and say "do it like this". I've started trying to rectify that by being specific in my requests and
making KLE files where I think it might be useful, but until somebody actually runs with it it's going to require a lot of explaining every time.
Finally, there's the problem of finding keyboards which support the layout, since the "_ ろ" key to the left of the right shift key is not present in many custom keyboards. Of course, if you're just swapping keycaps on a Filco or something this isn't a problem. I think there may be a path forward here, too, though: many keyboards support splitting the right shift to add a 1U "Function" button to the right of it. If an alternative layout could be supported with these keys flipped, so that the 1U appears on the left instead of the right, then a JIS layout could be achieved. I suggested this on
the Apogee thread and Flexerman was very accommodating. It seems like a pretty easy addition, so I'm hoping future PCB designers might bear it in mind as a possibility. Again, this will only happen if there seems to be a need for it -- which comes from us making suggestions on IC threads.
The most important thing, I think, is not to give up, but also not to be annoying (I hope I am managing to tread this fine line). All we can do is ask designers to consider these requests, but it is up to them whether or not to do so, and especially when asking for support for relatively untested kits we are asking them to do quite a lot of work on our behalf (designing the kits and so on). We certainly can't win them all, and it behoves us to be cognisant of what we are asking of designers, and to do anything we can to make their lives easier if they do decide to add support to a set. This is why I try and adapt my KLE files to the set that I'm making a request of before sending it, for example. So, we must make our voices heard, but try not to be too pushy!
Anyway, glad to have another JIS user here and active on the forums! Please join me in my quest to increase awareness of JIS-related issues in keyboard and keycap design, and let me know if you have any questions!
EDIT: Just remembered I also requested some JIS additions
here, but got no response. I don't think this set is finalised, so might be worth lending your voice to the choir here also if you're interested in the set.