I really appreciate your feedback and to be fair, I haven't considered JIS compat at first
I understand; thank you for taking the time to consider it now!
AFAIK most of the JIS boards are Topre and the user base is pretty tiny, maybe i'm wrong.
Topre probably gets used in Japan more than most markets, but I would still think of it as a high-end minority. Filco, for example, which is probably the most well-known "high-end consumer" brand mechanical keyboard, uses Cherry-compatible switches.
You are right that the user base in terms of people who are both into custom mechanical keyboards and prefer to use JIS is quite small at the moment. I think this is something of a chicken-and-egg problem, as without JIS compatibility becoming more widespread in the custom community, any Japanese users that prefer JIS will be put off, and will either back away from custom keysets entirely and buy one of the many coloured keycaps Filco offers, or give up on JIS and adopt ANSI. The Japanese mechanical keyboard market is large, but I don't know what proportion of people do the latter vs the former (and I think it's probably impossible to know). For those people that do prefer JIS and are as a result currently put off by the general lack of JIS support, I would like to help make it possible to join the community, especially for sets that directly reference Japanese culture and keyboard history.
Sets like
GMK JIS WoB are chipping away at improving the compatibility story, so for GMK hopefully if we can get the moulds made that would make it easier for any other designers going forward to consider JIS support. I think with ePBT this is a little easier?
Still, full JIS compatibility involves quite a few extra keys, and the jury is still out on how popular it will turn out to be in the long run. All I can ask is that designers like you will consider including support in good faith; I cannot insist upon it.
However your proposal for the JIS compatibility by adding R1 ー and 1U backspace makes sense. Only on Kana kit?
So, to be clear, I have two separate proposals:
- Add R1 ー to the kana kit and 1U backspace to either kana or base (I think it might as well be base). This strikes me as extremely easy to do and has become quite common for sets offering kana monolegend kits, so I would like to recommend this quite strongly.
- Add a JIS add-on kit for those who want JIS support on top of base (i.e. roman+sublegends, not kana monolegends). This is more involved, but is what would be needed for "full" JIS support. Luckily, there are some examples out there to help guide the kitting:
- GMK TeraDrive includes a comprehensive JIS kit, including the extra mods and space bars allowing it to be used on a variety of Japanese keyboards. The legends are based on those from GMK JIS WoB.
- KAT Great Wave splits its JIS support into two separate kits: one for the alphas, and another for the mods and spacebars. This demonstrates a more minimal approach, if you only wanted to add JIS alphas but not include the extra 変換/無変換 mods, for example.
The first of these is relatively simple and, I think, uncontroversial. The second requires more consideration. I am happy to answer any questions you might have about approaching this JIS kit either here, in DM, or on Discord (kidviddy#3465).
Regarding the 1U backspace, JIS has 2 liner legends (see: https://external-preview.redd.it/FYbsYkeL11nP1WZsTipwaYQ0Xj4rAgkDUUVNpDsgQqs.jpg?auto=webp&s=e6f66eca8e3527b16148d717eb527f4b5d40ebde ) but it would not fit with all the one line legends of the set, what about having BACK?
Yep, I think just "Back" is fine, and that's the approach both of the examples linked above have taken.
Front legends
I added the table of all the legends you can find on the keyset at the bottom of the first post in the REFERENCES chapter. Feel free to comment/fix those.
Thank you, this is helpful. I'll try to find time to go through them properly, but at first glance the only ones that seem "weird" to me are 上がる and 降りる. I see that you already have 前頁 (previous page) and 次頁 (next page), which I had suggested in my previous post, on your [: ;] and [" '] keys respectively, so you might not want to reuse them. You also have 頁頭 (page head/top of current page) and 頁末 (page foot/bottom of current page) on your up and down keys, so you have a wealth of page navigation keys available already! I'll see if I can think of any alternative options if I get the chance.
EDIT: And フランスパン obviously, but you probably knew that was weird when you wrote it!
