The ACORNS program supports keyboard mapping for indigenous scripts. There are several ways that this can be done. we describe each approach in the following sections.
ACORNS can support any indigenous keyboard font that is installed in true type font (ttf) format. ACORNS automatically recognizes the fonts already installed on your system. Other indigenous fonts need to be downloaded and installed before ACORNS can use them. There are standard procedures depending on your computer system to make additional fonts available. Once this is done, ACORNS will recognize their presence.
To activate a particular font, see the Fonts page. It will instruct you how to use indigenous fonts with ACORNS. To select a font for primary use, select the tools menu and then click options. A drop down menu will show the keyboard choices known to ACORNS. After you select a keyboard mapping, all of the ACORNS dialogs that request native language input will use that mapping. ACORNS will retain the keyboard mapping until it is later changed or overridden. It remembers the mappings across application runs, so you don't have to repeat the option selection process.Each computer platform allows users to select Unicode keyboard layouts. ACORNS recognizes these layouts in the same way as other applications that are installed on your system.
Within the Documents folder an Acorns folder is created (or the acornsFiles Folder on earlier installations). Applications acquired from Apple Store have strict restrictions regarding file access. Therefore, the Apple Store version uses a user-selected folder instead of Documents.
On APPLE systems, keyboard layouts are controlled by .keylayout files. Simply drop one (or more) of these files into the acornsFiles/keylayoutFiles (or Acorns/keyLayoutFiles on newer installations). If neither the acornsFiles or Acorns folders exist, they will be created automatically by ACORNS software. ACORNS can use .keyLayout files on Windows and other computer platforms. Just make sure that when you add the font to ACORNS (see Fonts), that you specify the language name to match the file name (without the .keylayout extension) of your .keylayout file. The advantage of using keylayouts this way is they will automatically embed into Web and Mobile-based versions of the lessons you create.
.keylayout files are widely available. However you can create your own using the ACORNS ELK application. APPLE also has utilities that can be used to do the same thing. The ELK application can also be used to create custom True Type Font files.