The only thing that occurs to me is that 7 rows of keys makes it pretty tall.
Yes. I was worried about that too, because while I don't think the keyboard would be excessively tall, putting extra keys in that area would be difficult for Unicomp in particular, since they would have to use a wider plastic sheet for the contacts.
Seven rows works, because the space between the five-row typing area and the function keys is that of a full row of keys, but the inverted-T cursor area makes it an eighth row.
I'm afraid that I think that the best way to fit in with this constraint is to disappoint you, and drop the cursor cluster, like this:
EDIT: But letting the cursor right key stick out on the end of the layout would be no problem, and so all that needs to be done is omit the right Windows Shift key - or toss it somewhere, like above the cursor right key, so there are possibilities for keeping the cursor cluster, following the arrangement you suggested, but without even squeezing the spacebar!
Generally, most laptop keyboards don't retain it - unless they use reduced-height keys, and that would not work with buckling springs.
EDIT: Further thought has brought another idea to mind. The big problem with shrinking the space bar is that it moves the Alt key to a spot less accessible to the little finger to shift with it. So if I shrink the space bar by one key's worth, and move the Alt key one place to the right (replacing the right Windows Shift), I could put the cursor left and cursor right keys between the spacebar and the right Alt key. This wouldn't be the same sort of cluster, but at least those keys would now be very near the cursor up and down keys, separated only by the Alt and Ctrl keys.
So the bottom row would be ctrl, win shift, alt, space bar, cursor left, cursor right, alt, ctrl, cursor down.
If a right Windows Shift key is needed, and placing it in the top row doesn't work... it could replace |\, and that key could be put in the top row. Of course, this is starting to require more extensive changes from the basic 101-key layout.
What tool are you using to draw these layouts..?
I do the actual drawing in Paintbrush, the paint program included with Windows 3.1, because its interface is uncluttered. Then I use a different paint program to remap the color palette of the image and convert it to GIF. So nothing fancy is involved.
EDIT: But the important thing is that I still don't have to draw the whole keyboard by hand. I start out by drawing
one key, with construction lines to help me position it, and the keyboard is built by copying and pasting - and, then, I create new keyboard designs simply by copying from old ones.
