Recently I have been working on a project relating to keyboards and the translation of keyboard input to its associated character output. Basically, I want to cache all possible input combinations so I can look them up at runtime without having to call the ToUnicodeEx API with potentially ‘tainted’ state, which was causing problems with dead keys when I called it from a keyboard hook (or other similar mechanisms).

I have been working on this with the help of Michael Kaplan’s blog and his amazingly detailed and helpful series Getting all you can out of a keyboard layout. So far I have just been porting the code to C++, one step in the series at a time, to gain a better understanding of how everything works. When I reached part 10a however I noticed that there seemed to be a missing part 10b. I raised this with Mr Kaplan on his blog and he has graciously agreed to write the final piece of the series.

No code from me yet (I do wish however to eventually post my port of the code to C++), but I wanted to give a shout-out to Mr Kaplan and encourage others to check out his awesome blog. If you’re interested in i18n/l10n, languages, keyboards, etc you will probably find yourself going back and reading years worth of archives like I did.