Dear Behnam, Thanks for your remarks.
Yes, I was thinking of a special keyboard for so-called expert users but including also people who have an occasional need to switch from one language to the other but do not want to learn a new keyboard layout (in this aspect, I fully agree with your observation that few people can be expected to learn new keyboard layouts; this is even true for expert users!) I am about to create a similar keyboard solution for Extended Cyrillic which includes many Turkic languages that are nowadays also (or again) written using the Arabic alphabet. And I know that one of the major obstacles of "switching back" is that people are used to the Cyrillic keyboard layout, which would make it almost mandatory that input of characters of the Arabic alphabet is done via the customary keyboard layout, i.e. using Cyrillic "phonetic" approximations for Arabic characters. So at least in this particular area of our globe there should be sufficient need for a keyboard that can produce the local language (using the Arabic alphabet), plus Arabic, plus Persian. As to switching keyboards: This will always be the default. But clever keyboard designers like to offer built-in options for *occasional use* (e.g. the new ISIRI keyboard for Arabic, or Keyboard US-International featuring simple mnemonic combinations to create all characters used by Western European languages, including accented characters). I think that there is always a certain need for such solutions in multilingual areas. The Greater EU is such a sample, as there is a growing need to type multilingual documents, or at least documents including personal or geographic names from several member states, which makes it mandatory to create a unified keyboard layout. Best regards, Peter -----Original Message----- From: Behnam [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 4:38 PM To: Linguasoft Subject: Re: A piece of history Peter, The problem of course is not to put all Arabic characters in one keyboard. The problem is the layout. You'd be surprised (as I was) how resilient and how reluctant people are in changing the layout of the keyboard with which they first learned to type. Even within one language. Apple has one layout for Persian keyboard. MS has a slightly different one. And now we have the standard layout which is not too foreign to PC users. I designed a Persian keyboard based on Apple Macintosh Persian keyboard layout and I added few missing Farsi characters and some additional "goodies" and I sent it to the person who is testing my Unicode Persian fonts on Macintosh. He simply refused to test it! because the characters weren't where he expects them to be! and the funny thing is that he is not even used to the original Apple layout. It seems that the first word processor supporting right to left on Mac (in mid eighties) had it's own keyboard layout setting for Farsi (if I remember correctly, it's called something like "Alketabat") and he is still using that layout! I don't think that it would even work for people who are introduced to typing for the first time. Each language has it's own main characters and alphabet and those characters should be all on front keys (without modifiers) this can not be accomplished and even if it can, one front key for one language is one wasted key for the other. For those who care to type fast, this is very important. I don't know how it works on PC but on Mac platform, you can easily switch from one keyboard layout (Dari for example) to another (Arabic) or even a Roman language. I think it's better to leave this option available for users to choose the keyboard layout they want. Or maybe you were thinking about a speciality keyboard for linguists? What seems to me is more practical, is to create fonts that contain all characters of languages of Arabic family which can be used with any keyboard layout. Something like system fonts, but more complete and good looking! Behnam On 12-Jan-04, at 6:00 AM, Linguasoft wrote: > > What may make more sense these days is a keyboard that supports all the > glyphs of the Extended Arabic codeset, from Maghrebian to Uyghur or > Malay, > and since many of the people concerned have been subject to one or > several > script "reforms" in a not too distant past, or are at least used to > English > or Russian as commercial (and computing) languages, it would probably > be > best to start this approach on the basis of a standard US or Cyrillic > keyboard. > _______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
