Since there are no international keycaps on the Das Keyboard 4, I finally decided to make a custom one. Started with the blank keys but it was sometimes a bit annoying when I had to type with one hand, for confirmation codes and so on. Right, the perfect excuse
WASD Keyboards made a wonderful job, overall I'm very satisfied! They did have to reprint a couple of keys, but the difference from the specs was very minor, barely noticeable, and they were quick and reactive to the problem, even gave away a few stabilizer inserts I needed for free
The material is pleasant to the touch, which was my main concern. It's still ABS but I find the touch feeling on par with the original keys from Das Keyboard, even slightly better, perhaps a tad rougher and so less slippery due to the print process - that may not be true if you compare to the printed keycaps of the Professional version, I couldn't say since I have the Ultimate.
If you want to swap the keycaps on the Das,
don't forget to get those stabilizer inserts, you'll need 6 pairs; Metadot had the stupid idea of glueing their inserts to the keycaps, so most of them can't be recovered! Other than that, the keycaps are completely compatible with the Das Keyboard.
The colours are quite correctly rendered, though if you look the keycaps from some angles you notice the process artefacts. It looks a little like a print from a dot printer: successive horizontal bands. But it's only if you look at extreme angles under a grazing light source, under normal circumstances it is not visible. You can see what I mean on the right of the photograph below, especially the numpad return key.
PS: the font I used is
overlock, this is an open-source font, easy to find. Don't forget to remove the fonts from the .svg when you send it to WASD, it's not described on their website but you have to do it. Here's how:
In Inkscape:
Select all of your text/fonts, then go Path > Object to Path (Ctrl + Shift + C)
In Illustrator:
Select all of your text/fonts, then go Object > Expand… (Expand both Stroke and Fill)
