www.ezer.dk

EzerKb - Ezer’s Virtual Keyboard

What Is EzerKb?

EzerKb is a virtual keyboard program with the following features:

• With EzerKb you can write characters in foreign alphabets (for example Hebrew, Greek, or Russian) as if you had a keyboard for that alphabet.
• EzerKb is not a keyboard driver. It is installed as easily as any other program.
• EzerKb allows you to type foreign characters using your mouse to click on an on-screen keyboard, or using your ordinary keyboard with an on-screen guide to the location of the keys.
• EzerKb reads the keyboard layout from an XML configuration file. This means that it is easy to modify the foreign keyboard to look exactly the way you like.
• EzerKb works with most (but unfortunately not all) Windows programs.
• EzerKb is free. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.
• EzerKb comes with keyboard designs for Russian, classical Hebrew, and classical Greek. If you need other languages, EzerKb allows you design the keyboard layout yourself.
• EzerKb has been successfully tested on Windows XP, Vista and 7.

Screenshots

EzerKb was written by Claus Tøndering of Ezer IT Consulting.

What EzerKb Is Not

EzerKb is not a keyboard driver. It is an ordinary Windows program. This means that EzerKb is well-suited for writing single words and short texts in a foreign alphabet; but if you need to write whole documents, I would strongly advise you to consider using a proper foreign keyboard driver instead.

EzerKb has a number of important shortcomings that you must be aware of.

• A few Windows programs (notably Microsoft Outlook 2007) handle input in an uncommon way, which means that they do not work with EzerKb. Microsoft Word 2007 does work with EzerKb, but it gets very confused if you are using right-to-left text such as Hebrew. (Amusingly, Hebrew works fine with Notepad and WordPad, so you can write your Hebrew text in those programs and the copy and paste it into Word or Outlook.) EzerKb works well with OpenOffice Writer version 3.1 (I have not tested other versions).
• EzerKb receives your keystrokes, translates them, and sends them to the target program. This takes a few milliseconds, which means that there is a limit to how fast you can type.

Status

EzerKb is currently in the alpha stage of development. Windows executables and source code are available on SourceForge.

Documentation

A Users’ Guide is available.

Implementation

EzerKb is written in C++ using the Qt framework.

Background

EzerKb was developed as part of a project to develop exercise and test technology for the study of Biblical Hebrew. For details see 3ET exercises and 3BH Moodle.

Updated: 2010-03-05 08:51:02