I’m just as excited as everyone waiting for my red F77 order to ship later this year! I think that Ellipse is putting a lot of effort into making sure things are made to spec and as this is not a cheap keyboard, I feel like he’s doing a good job and staying very transparent to the ups and downs of the production process.
I have often felt frustrated with the right hand number block because on one hand I have very little need for numbers, and on the other hand the Home/End/pg up/pg dwn/insert option leaves a lot of blank unused keys sitting around the arrow cluster.
I use the markdown syntax to write, using pandoc to export directly to PDF or to LibreOffice or Ulysses to finish (and export). I only discovered markdown about three yeas ago, but I’m totally converted, love it.
So I was thinking about getting custom keys for symbols that I use all the time to format using the markdown syntax; these include: # * > \ (and a few others) and I though that this would be a perfect way to have a right hand block that would actually be really functional, using all the keys for stuff I use regularly. Instead of calling it a ‘right hand block’, it’d be a propper ‘writer’s block’… 😉
My question to everyone: Is Unicomp our only solution to buy custom keys? Does anyone know how good or bad their custom keys are? On internet forums some people say they are fine, and other people say they are junk–granted all the posts that I found where several years old, so I don’t know if things have changed at all since or not. I ask because I know some of you may have more knowledge about different suppliers and group buys that might be alternative solutions. I wish that Ellipse would make custom keys, but it sounds like he’s sticking to producing standard sets only, which is understandable.
Anyone have any thoughts about the matter?
kind regards
Hey Jean-Loup,
Sorry, I missed your earlier replies here.
Here are the responses I got from Unicomp:
In response to a question about whether they could print front legends (legends on the front side of key caps), the response I got was that “Unfortunately, we do not print on the side of the keys unless it is a key we already have on a keyboard.”
In response to a question about whether I could have them print and send me a combo NumLk + ScrollLk key (which is one that actually exists on some Space Saver models!), I was told “In order to print the one key ‘NumLk and ScrLk’ we would need to print the whole button set [for the keyboard model that the key is part of]. The cost for the button set is $30.00.” (Text in [] is not in their actual reply, just what I took as implied by their response.)
When taken together, their responses tell a story that they are not willing nor interested in doing custom keys. If they could, they would not have (as you correctly pointed out) a sentence on their web site saying that “We only print standard key legends”, they would have no problems doing custom front legends, and they would be able to print a single “NumLk ScrollLk” key without requiring that I purchase the entire set of keys (since it would make no sense that if they do custom keys, they wouldn’t be able to treat “NumLk ScrollLk” as a one-off custom key).
I’m really not interested in blank caps. Surely there has to be a solution / someone willing to print these for us!