JIS contains a lot of different standards if I am not mistaken. The bottom row on some of these layouts are not supported by the PCB or the plate. You could design your own plate, then get a 60% PCB with daughterboard support and JIS layout support. If that exist.
Thanks for the reply.
All that would be required for *basic* JIS support is the ability to swap the right shift key with the Menu/Fn key, so that the 1U appears on the left and the right shift is flush to the right of the keyboard. That, in combination with the existing ISO support and the split backspace, is enough to get the correct layout for the alphas.
For full JIS support, you would need a smaller space bar configuration to make room for two extra 1U or 1.25U buttons to either side of it, and optionally a third 1U as well. For example, 1.25U/2.75U/1.25U/1U takes up the same amount of space as a 6.25U space bar and would give you all the keys for both Mac and Windows JIS configurations.
The latter is a big ask, and not many PCBs support it either — some GH60 clones with “minila” style layouts, and that’s about it. But the former is relatively easy to add to what is otherwise a pretty standard PCB, and I believe also useful for Brazilian users (though I admit I don’t know much about this), so I’d love to see greater mainstream adoption of a “swapped” split right shift in the future.
In the meanwhile, I’m pretty resigned to the fact that JIS support is not going to be common on PCBs for the foreseeable future, so I’m trying to learn what I can about PCB design so that I could design something with JIS support to use myself. I am still very much in the “no idea what I’m doing” phase of that exploration, though ;-)
I’ll have a look into what goes into designing a PCB with daughterboard support. How much clearance is there under the PCB in this case to seat the daughterboard? (I presume that’s how this works?)