Creating Your Own Resco Keyboard Skin

Originally Posted by Alex Jonathan, I stumbled upon your post on aximsite (http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showthread.php?t=64806) and wonder if you could share your expertise in how to retool the Resco keyboard for displaying the Fitaly layout. Would you be willing to send me the setup file and/or the skin that accomplishes the task? Truth be told, I do not have much aptitude nor time for fiddling with this thing myself... Notwithstanding, you've done a clever thing with Resco and I thank you in advance for sharing the fruits of your labor. Regards, Alex

Alex, I would be delighted to share with you how to create your own Resco Keyboard skin. There are two concepts: customizing the character mapping, and customizing the key shapes.


Customizing the Character Mapping

Open the Custom.map file in a text editor, and you will see something like this:

16 q Q 00E0 00C0
17 w W 00E1 00C1
18 e E 00E2 00C2
19 r R 00E3 00C3
20 t T 00E4 00C4
21 y Y 00E5 00C5

I don't know what the stuff in the last couple of columns are, but you can see that columns 2 and 3 are for the letter and the slide-up character. So you can see that to move letters around, all you have to do is edit this file.


Customizing the Key Shapes

Open the Default.png file in Microsoft Paint, and you will see that the keyboard is repeated 3 times:



The red keyboard on the left tells the Resco program what the key borders are. The middle keyboard is what you normally see. The right keyboard is what you see when you press a key.

Important Point: Every key has a slightly different shade of red on the left keyboard. So to move a key to a completely different place, you must also transport that particular shade of red. The shade of red tells Resco Keyboard which character to use from the Custom.map file mentioned earlier. The Eyedropper tool in Microsoft Paint proves useful here, as it captures any colour that you click on.

So you can see that to change the shape of a key, you must change the shape of that key on all three keyboards in the image file, taking care to maintain the key's shade of red on the left keyboard.



Hope that is useful to future Resco Keyboard skinners!