Elvish PBT SA dye-sub & Laser Engraved Keycap set

[sennin32]

Hi, we are Doyu Studio.
Top seller on eBay
http://stores.ebay.com/doyustudio
http://shopkey.doyustudio.com/
https://www.facebook.com/douystudio/pos ... 3188030118

We've ran several GBs this year
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=85761.0
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=79182.0


GB link for keycap with origin box(Higher shipping fee) : http://shopkey.doyustudio.com/021cape01grs-b.html
GB link for keycap with zip bag(Lower shipping fee) : http://shopkey.doyustudio.com/021cape01grs.html
GB link for Extra : http://shopkey.doyustudio.com/021cape01gre1.html

This GB is about a Elvish alpha keycap
Material : PBT
Profile : SA 22333(Based on Filco's)
Printing : top printed
This keycap set contain several tech of printing.
1. White caps are using dye-sub printing.
2. Green(Both light and deep) are dip-dye with white PBT caps
3. White legends on green caps are made by cutting from surface with laser, and origin plastic color shows up.
These techs make sure this cap has a nice quality and lifetime.

View more images : http://imgur.com/a/Ta0R0
This keycap set has ANSI 104 keys and some extra
Alpha set, modify set aren't get enough interesting in the IC, so we won't have it this time.

GB timeline :
Start from : 2016/12/14 00:00 (UTC+8)
Ends on : 2017/1/10 23:59 (UTC+8)
Estimate Shipping : Mid Mar to Late Mar, 2017
(2 months from GB End, We hope we can finish it within 1 month after GB ends,
But it's a little rush and Chinese New Year is from Jan/25~Feb/3, afraid we can't do it within 1 month,
So we promise a timeline which is easier to finish.)

If you have any questions/issues.
Please contact sy_yang@doyustudio.com

[evoman]

I find this so bizarre - one of the only SA sets in PBT and at a good price, but it has the addition of the 'elvish' characters, which are totally useless to me - I would love to have a set like this, but I just cannot justify to myself the idea of having a set with extra distracting characters printed (I am also not a huge fan of the colour). I really hope there is a follow up with a similar set, but without the extra characters and perhaps in a more subtle colour combination.

[zslane]

I'm mostly curious where they sourced the keycap shells from.

[duynguyenle]

I'm mostly curious where they sourced the keycap shells from.

What do you mean keycap shells

[zslane]

The keycaps themselves. I wasn't aware that Signature Plastics sold blank SA keycaps in bulk to third parties to print/etch legends onto and re-sell.

[lot_lizard]

The keycaps themselves. I wasn't aware that Signature Plastics sold blank SA keycaps in bulk to third parties to print/etch legends onto and re-sell.

I've kept my mouth shut about Signature Plastics publicly, but this company (err... LLC) has almost ZERO copyright, trademark, registered trademark, or patents in place (I've looked). It's a joke really in the scheme of an actual business in terms of legal. International patents are difficult to enforce regardless, but these yahoos haven't even attempted to do much to protect themselves domestically. The few bits they have done have expired actually... For them to be a bottleneck with real demand, it is no wonder someone hasn't entered their space (I've debated it).


I am by no stretch poking at their product. They have great quality. But the people running the business aren't protecting themselves even close to properly.

The quality of these knock-offs might be COMPLETE garbage (no idea), but there is nothing out there to prevent them from entering this space, and also borrowing the terms from Signature Plastics. The term "SA" in regards to this context profile pitch is certainly not protected CURRENTLY, and again... international becomes DIFFICULT to enforce.

Again... not knocking SP. I will be participating in your Dasher/Dancer GB, have been in multiple of 7bit's. But we should expect this knock-off fluff given the delays/demand.

[Parjánya]

By "based on Filco’s" I understood they are clones.

[zslane]

The keycaps themselves. I wasn't aware that Signature Plastics sold blank SA keycaps in bulk to third parties to print/etch legends onto and re-sell.

I've kept my mouth shut about Signature Plastics publicly, but this company (err... LLC) has almost ZERO copyright, trademark, registered trademark, or patents in place (I've looked). It's a joke really in the scheme of an actual business in terms of legal. International patents are difficult to enforce regardless, but these yahoos haven't even attempted to do much to protect themselves domestically. The few bits they have done have expired actually... For them to be a bottleneck with real demand, it is no wonder someone hasn't entered their space (I've debated it).


I am by no stretch poking at their product. They have great quality. But the people running the business aren't protecting themselves even close to properly.

The quality of these knock-offs might be COMPLETE garbage (no idea), but there is nothing out there to prevent them from entering this space, and also borrowing the terms from Signature Plastics. The term "SA" in regards to this context profile pitch is certainly not protected CURRENTLY, and again... international becomes DIFFICULT to enforce.

Again... not knocking SP. I will be participating in your Dasher/Dancer GB, have been in multiple of 7bit's. But we should expect this knock-off fluff given the delays/demand.

Oh, I totally get where you're coming from and I agree.

I would expect a Chinese knock-off artist to use the "SA" tag to their (marketing) advantage, but most mech board enthusiasts are sticklers for detail, and I expected more of them to point with scorn at any keycap calling itself "SA" when it's not an exact copy of "SA".

Then again, maybe it is an exact copy of SA. Until we get some to compare with actual SA keycaps, we won't know for sure.

[.Citizenation]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

[livingspeedbump]

I'll pass.

[matt3o]

sorry but... the alignment of those elvish legends is all wrong... not to mention some of them seem just made up... just saying...

[evoman]

sorry but... the alignment of those elvish legends is all wrong... not to mention some of them seem just made up... just saying...

Maybe someone can explain to me the attraction someone would have for using a set like this - I simply cannot fathom (not to mention the motivation for a seller to add the elvish, which I would have thought would do more to depress the market for a set like this than to solidify or expand).

[zslane]

The attraction is not unlike keycaps with Cyrillic legends and roman secondary legends. Done correctly, they look amazing, as shown below:

Granite with Sindarin alphas and RGB icon modifiers

IMG_0371.JPG (526.23 KiB) Viewed 9721 times

[matt3o]

those are lovingly crafted legends @zslane

[evoman]

The attraction is not unlike keycaps with Cyrillic legends and roman secondary legends. Done correctly, they look amazing, as shown below:

But I still don't understand why elvish would be a broadly attractive option. People actually use Cyrillic to write in their native language, so there is a clear utility. But as far as I understand, there is not a large elvish speaking community.

My broader point is that, given that there are not many SA keycaps in PBT, why not produce a set that will have broad appeal - i.e., why bother adding the elvish legends?

[Wodan]

...
But I still don't understand why elvish would be a broadly attractive option. People actually use Cyrillic to write in their native language, so there is a clear utility. But as far as I understand, there is not a large elvish speaking community.
...

Judging by the amount of nerdness in the keyboard community, I guess more people use elvish sublegend to write elvish than people using cyrilic sublegends to write cyrilc

Right, matt3o the grey?

[Findecanor]

Elvish is not a single language, and there is not one "Elvish" writing script either. The most common Elvish languages are Quenya and Sindarin. From what I have seen, it has been especially LARP:ers that have learned to speak (one of) these - but most often using latin letters and a very simplified grammar.
Another major language is Westron which is the "common speak" of humans and between races at the age of Lord of the Rings. There are also several other languages of men, elves and other beings.

The most known script system is called "Tengwar" - which I suppose is the one depicted here. It also exists in a couple of variations. Most writing systems could be used for several languages. For instance, The One Ring has a type of orchish engraved in Tengwar. Then there are different "modes" for using the script for various languages.
There are other common writing systems, such as Cirth which is very rune-like. There is a bit of info on them on Wikipedia.

If you go search for "tengwar keyboard layout" then you will find several different layouts that are very different from the ones posted in this thread.
The Doyu Studio keyboard's layout seems to map each Tengwar glyph onto the key with the most similar latin letter and for a style where vowels are diacritic marks and not separate letters. The granite with "Sindarin" glyphs uses another layout, it looks like one that was pre-existing.

BTW, I don't actually know much about these languages even though my username is the Quenya name of a character from Silmarillion, ("Fingon" in Sindarin) but which somehow got an extra 'r' at the end. Curiously enough I am not the only one on the 'net with that alias with that misspelling. I can sing a few songs from Lord of the Rings movies but I don't know what they mean: Howard Shore have divided words to force-fit the syllables into fitting the music so the songs are sometimes quite unintelligible even to someone who knows the language.

[matt3o]

this is all you need to know about keycaps in elvish and tengwar http://matt3o.com/granite-elven-kit-explained/

ps: the one ring is written in The Black Speech which was created by Sauron itself.

[Menuhin]

There are less debate about DCS vs Cherry vs Gateron profile and various OEM profiles: are they patented?

In such a vast country with abundant resources, the Chinese can sooner or later create something they have seen somewhere else. It is just a culture that everybody copes everybody else, there has been no concept about copyright and related legal protection by the system for these trades - it's just not a rule-by-law country in a copyright sense, may people say that is primitive or not. It's just like whenever you see something on the street in some countries of Africa, then you can make it yours.

Set aside legal matters, as much as I want to see more competitions in key caps manufacturing in various profiles.
From here, I can see that majority of Chinese manufacturers are just lazy, sloppy, cost-cutting copycats, while they could have done much better jobs to copy from the earlier original designs:
photos-f62/space-cadet-t6450-30.html#p125228
But they would never do that, because they're not like the perfectionist engineers in other countries. It's not in their gene or meme, while sheer profit making is.


What saddens me more is that the Chinese manufacturers have leisure to entertain these gimmick languages from movies and TV series. If you're not actors and actresses or writers/linguists/enthusiasts who need/want to work on artificially created languages like Klingon, Tengwar, Dothraki, Valyrian, etc, then you probably won't need those extra scripts on your keyboards. Given all those Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Elvish key sets the Chinese manufacturers have created, there's not a single set of Chinese language key set I've seen.


This keyboard layout from James Bond "Tomorrow Never Dies" is real:
https://youtu.be/5m1VLmzTCrY?t=79

Spoiler:

This input system was invented so that it is independent of the dialect of Chinese language (200+ dialects in just China) and the writing system (Traditional form in Taiwan and Simplified form in mainland China) the user is accustomed to. And it is still one of the fastest input systems for Chinese characters since its invention in the 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method
by the father of modern Chinese computing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_Bong-Foo

Further readings about the development of input systems for the Chinese languages:

Spoiler:

https://translate.google.com/translate? ... B8%8A.html
https://translate.google.com/translate? ... edit-text=

[zslane]

...
But I still don't understand why elvish would be a broadly attractive option. People actually use Cyrillic to write in their native language, so there is a clear utility. But as far as I understand, there is not a large elvish speaking community.
...

Judging by the amount of nerdness in the keyboard community, I guess more people use elvish sublegend to write elvish than people using cyrilic sublegends to write cyrilc

Right, matt3o the grey?

I tend to agree with you, Wodan. I am willing to bet that 99% of buyers of custom keycaps with Cyrillic legends do not read (or write) Cyrillic, and only want those legends because they look "cool" to them. To them, every alpha is a sort of novelty key, and that's the sole attraction.

[Findecanor]

Personally I am not interested in SA or DSA. I would like a contoured Tengwar-only set in Cherry or DCS profile though.

There are less debate about DCS vs Cherry vs Gateron profile and various OEM profiles: are they patented?

I suppose that they are not. Many have copied Cherry profile. I have also owned two types of keyboards that have had caps identical to DCS profile - one of them from BTC. (Not counting Wyse's that were made from the same tooling as DCS)

[Shihatsu]

One Ring uses Tengwar Letters, the language is black speech.

[webwit]

"Yo Dawg i herd you like rings so i've made a ring to rule yo rings."

[seebart]

fvvg5.jpg (36.85 KiB) Viewed 9471 times

[matt3o]

One Ring uses Tengwar Letters, the language is black speech.

this is beyond pedantic. it's like saying: "this message is written in letters, the language is English"

[Wodan]

this is beyond pedantic. it's like saying: "this message is written in latin letters, the language is English"

Fixed that for you

[matt3o]

speaking of pedantic...

[Wodan]

Just saying ... that really helps the non-Tolkien expert understand a lot better how elvish letters relate to the elvish language...s

There's alsot tons of other languages that use cyrillic letters

[seebart]

4236827.jpg (19.95 KiB) Viewed 9433 times

[zslane]

Yeah, I don't think it is really very difficult to understand: Tengwar is an (Elvish) alphabet of glyphs. Quenya and Sindarin are essentially dialects of a language (Elvish). But Tengwar can be used to write any language since it is phonetic in nature.

We can all agree that the Granite kit uses Tengwar glyphs; the real question is what makes it particularly Sindarin?