Here is a GIF of my Workbench using a Japanese Katakana font which I made.
The font, Japanese.font, is included with this archive. It tries to approximate
the normal operation of a font, even though the Katakana system works rather
differently from the normal Roman alphabet. In Katakana, entire syllables are
represented by one character. So, for example, there is no letter `R' in the
alphabet. But there are `RA', `RI', `RU', `RE', and `RO'. But how to map that
onto the Roman keyboard? I thought of using a good combination of shift, alt,
and control keys to make the different combinations of consonants and vowels.
The numbers are represented by the Kanji (Chinese characters) of the respective
number. 1 is "ichi", and 0 is "juu", so 0 is the character for 10. AFAIK, there
is no Kanji representation of the number 0 by itself. Other symbols, like the
hyphen, comma, period, quotation marks, etc, are represented by their Japanese
equivalents. The  symbol I made into the Hiragana "NO" character, just
because it could be useful, and because they look similar anyway.
So, for the font, pressing `r' makes the `RA' character; Shift-r makes `RI';
Alt-r, `RU'; Ctrl-r, `RE'; and Ctrl-Alt-r, `RO'. Problems arise in that the
middle row of keys (f,g,h,j,k) are special control keys, and don't work with
Alt. Not to mention that all those commodities have hotkeys like alt-b, alt-s,
and alt-n, etc. Oh, well, it was worth a try.
It's still fun to look at, though, huh? Enjoy!
Be sure to look on my WebPage for the other projects that I've put on AmiNet.
Chris Covell
ccovelldirect.ca
http://www.dsoe.com/zyx/covell/
"The memories of one lifetime take five to write about."
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