I thought the Japanese legends were just for aesthetics. Do people actually use them for JIS layouts? I see the argument for compatibility coming up recently, but I'm wondering how many people need that compatibility.
This is actually a surprisingly complex question which I and others on the forum have been trying to get to grips with. Lurking behind the apparently simple problem of whether people actually type using the kana input method whereby each key produces the kana character rendered on that key is the more complex problem of JIS support in general, which as far as I can tell has not received a huge amount of attention on this forum until recently.
To answer the first, simple question: yes, there are people that use the hiragana input method when typing Japanese (I am one of them), but it is also true that they are a minority, even in Japan. The romaji input method, whereby you might type the letters “t” followed by “a” and they would automatically be converted to “た”, is the more common way of inputting Japanese, even amongst native speakers of the language.
However, it is also true that within Japan at large, the vast majority of people use a JIS-layout keyboard. This is a similar problem to ISO support, Norde kits, take your pick — the location of many of the punctuation symbols is different from US-ANSI, and if that is your preferred layout it immediately rules out a huge range of keysets, since JIS support has traditionally been extremely lacking in the community. The only keyset I’ve found so far which really does it justice is
/dev/tty’s “Japan” set, which offers a remarkable level of support at the cost of adding a large number of extra keys.
Now, I would like to see full JIS support kits become commonplace not just for sets which involve kana monolegends or even sublegends, but for *all* kinds of sets, including sets which contain only Latin alphas. ISO and Norde have been an uphill battle for a long time but seem pretty commonplace now, and perhaps one day this will be the case for JIS, too. However, I understand that the ~9 extra alpha keys and 4 extra modifier keys required for full JIS support is a lot to ask. By comparison, supporting JIS alpha layouts fully on a monolegend set like this one is quite easy: all that is required is one extra key. From the people I’ve spoken to so far, this does not add much if anything to the overall cost of the set, and it opens it up to a whole class of users who might not otherwise have considered it.
Admittedly, I have a dog in this fight. This whole campaign started for me when I bought GMK WoB Hiragana, naively assuming it would have all the keys I needed, and I had to sell it on the day it arrived because I couldn’t use it with my (JIS) keyboard. I am trying to be reasonable about it, though — I understand that keyset designers have to balance a lot of trade-offs and they can’t satisfy everybody. That’s why I’ve so far focused my energy on kits in which supporting JIS layouts is both relatively easy and clearly justifiable; namely, kana monolegend sets. I don’t expect everyone to go along with it, but I do hope people can at least consider it, because I suspect that the lack of support so far has had as much to do with lack of awareness of what is required for JIS support as it has to do with the actual feasibility of including it. If I can help designers with the first issue so that they can make their own judgment regarding the second, then that is all I can ask for :-)
I hope that helps to answer your question! Feel free to follow up either here (if it won’t derail this thread too much), via DM or on Discord. I am on Tyson’s server as well as Keycap Designers and some others, and I’m eager to do what I can to help raise awareness generally of what’s involved in supporting JIS layouts!
