From October 1990[1] until its replacement by the AppleDesign Keyboard in 1994[2], Apple sold a keyboard named the Apple Extended Keyboard II. Many people, including myself, consider this to be the best keyboard ever made for the Macintosh.
Among the many advantages of the Nimitz (for that was its code-name) over other keyboards were two small pegs, next to the Escape and Power keys. These two pegs were for hanging the plastic overlay that came with the keyboard, whose purpose was to be an easy reference for the functions of the 15 function keys.
Photo by Flickr user Derek K. Miller.
Apple's overlay was only marginally useful back then: it defined F1–F4 as undo, cut, copy, and paste (for reasons I don't know), and made you write in any functions you actually used. It's even less useful now, because any apps that did use F1–F4 for those functions are now long dead.
At the start of May 2008, I was waiting for a Griffin iMate to arrive so I could restore my Extended Keyboard II to its rightful place under my fingers. (It has since arrived.) During this wait, I decided to create an updated overlay for systems running Mac OS X.
After creating my overlay, I also created an application that I call Apple Extended Keyboard II Overlay Generator. This app fills in a template that you can then print out, cut out, and assemble.
Included with the application are two overlays:
You're welcome to modify them or create your own.
Once you've chosen an overlay (or finished making or modifying one), you have three choices for what to do with it:
Saving as EPS has a couple of advantages over saving as PDF: first, it saves up to 1 second faster, because saving a PDF works by generating the EPS and converting it; second, it adapts to font availability on different computers (see Fonts, below).
If you've done it correctly, the text under F9 should look like one piece, as if the overlay itself were one piece.
 Success. |
 Fail. |
The font used on Apple's keyboards is Univers Condensed Oblique, according to Wikipedia's section on Apple keyboard fonts. Linotype will sell you a copy of this font for $29 USD.
Both the Generator and its EPS output will use Univers Condensed Oblique if you have it; if you don't, they will try Univers Light Condensed Oblique; if you don't have that, they will fall back on Arial Narrow Italic, which is close enough to Univers at a glance.
However, you may not need to buy the font to get Univers in your output. For me, in both Mac OS X 10.4.10 and 10.5.2, the labels were set in Univers even though I don't have that font. Even locate Univers doesn't find the font anywhere on my system, yet the output is definitely Univers. (The app itself does fall back on Arial, even on my system. Only the output—whether EPS, PDF, or printed—receives this benefit.)
 Arial Narrow Italic |
 Univers Condensed Oblique |
Note that the EPS file does its font checks when you render it, so you can save the EPS file on a machine that doesn't have Univers, then bring it to a machine that does, and it will (definitely) use Univers on that machine. (Hooray PostScript!) PDF files are static, so if you save as PDF, the font choice in that file is frozen, and won't change from one machine to another.
The Generator application is document-based. It opens and saves .aek2overlay files, which contain all the information it needs to reproduce the overlay. These are not only much smaller than finished EPS or PDF files, but also editable.
Two documents come with the application; I described them above. You can make your own overlays (e.g., for your own software, or for an entire office or computer lab) and distribute them.
The format is simple:
As of version 1.0, the only keys that the Generator will label are F1 through F15.
MD5 and SHA1 signatures were created using the md5sum(1) and sha1sum(1) utilities from GNU coreutils.
If you want to contribute bug-fixes or enhancements to Apple Extended Keyboard II Overlay Generator, the easiest way to do that is to clone the Mercurial repository for Apple Extended Keyboard II Overlay Generator. To do this, type this command into a terminal:
hg clone http://boredzo.org/aek2-overlay/hg AEK2-Overlay-Generator
I provide Apple Extended Keyboard II Overlay Generator—the application, and its source code—under a three-clause BSD license. For more information, see the file named LICENSE.txt that comes with it.
| 2008-05-07 http://boredzo.org/aek2-overlay |
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