la_us

A phonetically intuitive Lao keymap for XKB and US keyboards

This is a keymap designed to write Lao on a US keyboard under X11 without learning a complete new layout such as the STEA one that comes with XKB, but rather as close to phonetically as possible.

What?

For someone who doesn't speak Lao natively (and, I suspect, even for those who do), the organization of keys on the standard Lao STEA keyboard is highly unintuitive, so without a printed keymap, writing is impossible on an international keyboard. There have been several proposed keymaps for US and French keyboards that place Lao characters on the keys with similar-sounding Latin characters (see GMSware's LaoWord page for an overview), but none of these are very consistent nor optimized with regard to easy access to the most frequent characters.

This layout used to be a port of the LaoWord one to XKB but has since been substantially redesigned using corpus research into Lao letter frequencies.

• It's meant primarily for writing Lao, not putting the odd Lao character within English text, so Lao is in the main group (i.e. without using the Alt key)
• Long vowels າ, ເ, ◌ີ and ◌ູ are all in non-shifted positions while the short ones are shifted. The long ones are significantly more frequent so this helps both consistency and typing speed.
• As Lao numerals are used much less frequently than the Arabic ones, the latter are the same as on a US keyboard. With the shift key you get the Lao equivalents; Alt+NUM has a few tone marks and Alt+Shift+NUM gets you the usual US keyboard punctuation marks.
• You get ◌ັ and ◌ົ on x and z as on Windows, but they are also on AltGr-a and AltGr-o because that's where they belong phonetically.
• Tone marks ◌່ and ◌້ are on 1 and 2 as on Windows, but also on q and Q respectively for easier access without AltGr. Being very similar phonetically, ໄ and ໃ both go on the W key.
• Generally (for letters so/fo/ho/kho), the Sung variant is found in the unshifted position and Tam is shifted. Exceptions are Pho and Tho where the Tam variant is the more frequent one, so I chose typing speed over consistency here.

There is an SVG version of the layout included, based on Wikipedia user Michka_B's excellent hand-optimized US layout, licensed under the GNU FDL

How?

Wayland

Wayland itself doesn't deal with keymap loading but compositors usually implement their own keymap handling. Sway for instance looks for layouts in ~/.config/xkb and ~/.xkb, so simply copy both the "keymap" and "symbols" directories to one of those locations. I have no idea about other compositors but those locations seem to be common sense and I'd expect them to behave very similar.

X11

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of installing per-user XKB variants that would show up in common keyboard setup tools such as GNOME's, so you need to modify the system-wide config files.

The contents of the la file need to be appended to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/la (your path may vary depending on where your X11 directory is). Then, look for a section in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml (may also vary, use /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.xml if you're not using evdev) that looks like this:

<layout>
  <configItem>
    <name>la</name>

    <shortDescription>lo</shortDescription>
    <description>Lao</description>
    <languageList>
      <iso639Id>lao</iso639Id>
    </languageList>
  </configItem>
  <variantList>

After that, there are usually two sections between <variant> tags. Add another one like this:

<variant>
  <configItem>
    <name>la-us</name>
    <description>Lao (phonetic US)</description>
    <languageList>
      <iso639Id>lao</iso639Id>
    </languageList>
  </configItem>
</variant>

Make sure the new section sits between the <variantList> tags! This should enable a new variant in your keyboard layout chooser.

Note: libxkb definitely looks in ~/.xkb/symbols/ as well, so putting the la file there might work. It didn't work for me, but perhaps that's my distro's problem.