Once you have created a keyboard layout, you will want to install it so that it is available to application programs. Once installed and selected, a keystroke listener application is able to monitor keys pressed and produce appropriate output. On MAC systems, this process is easy, because tbese systems automatically make use of .keylayout files for defining keyboard layouts. Just click on Macintosh HD, navigate to the Library folder, and then to the Keyboard Layouts folder. Put the desired .keylayout files into that folder.
Windows Systems have a different built-in default mechanism for keyboard layouts. Check out Microsoft Windows documentation for details. A second alternative on Windows systems is to create keyboards with a commercial program like that provided by Tavultesoft. The ELK project provides a third alternative. If you choose to use this approach, Drop the .keylayout file into the Documents/acornsFiles/keyLayoutFiles folder (or into Documents/Acorns on newer installations. If neither of those folder exict create the Documents/Acorns/keyLayoutFiles folder and drop the keylayout files there.Then execute the ElkKeyboards application. If Elk is being run independent of other ACORNS applications, you'll also have to create a file called keylayouts.txt in the keyLayoutFiles folder. This file has one line per keyboard layout. An example of this follows:
Times New Roman, 12, Greek-TH
Times New Romans is the font, 12 is the font size, and Greek-TH (without the keylayout extension) is the name of the keylayout file that you dropped as described above. This program will allow you to select among the available keyboard layouts and alternate between them if you have more than one. It listens and modifies keystrokes before they are received by Windows application programs, like Word or Notepad.
If you are using ACORNS for language revitalization, it seamlessly utilize ELK keyboards and .ttf font files. In fact, this was the original motivation for the ELK project. That is, we desire to use a single, XML-based way to describe keyboard layouts that will work on all platforms. We also want users to be able to create web-based language lessons, and not require them install keylayouts or custom fonts on their local systems.
Note that although ACORNS and ELK runs on all platforms, the ElkKeyboards application, at this time, does not support UNIX-based systems. It is not needed on Mac-based systems because keyboard layout support is already integrated into those operating systems.