Date: Thu, 9 Oct 1997 08:17:10 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710091317.IAA23245@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: George Foot Sender: Lojban list From: George Foot Subject: {le logjji batkyta'o morna} logical keyboard layouts To: Lojban List X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 3214 X-From-Space-Date: Thu Oct 9 08:17:12 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU coi rodo Firstly, is {batkyta'o} = button-board a sensible word for keyboard? It was the best I could find, but {tanbo} implies a plank sort of board. Perhaps {skamrkiborda}? Or is that just the lazy way out? ;) There was some interest recently in how appropriate the Dvorak layout is for Lojban typing. I was playing around last night and wrote a short program to assess how different keyboard layouts compare with one another for a given piece of text. Preliminary results seem to suggest that the Dvorak layout should still be the more comfortable, despite things which seem wrong, like having the ' key on the same hand as the vowels, and the H key having a central position. I haven't tried it on many Lojban texts yet (I only have two!), and naturally the results depend to a large extent on how the program is configured (e.g. how `bad' it thinks different finger movements are). The results for the Martin Luther King speech and Tikitiki-whatever were (lower numbers indicating more comfort): Qwerty Dvorak Lojban luther 123.45 80.42 65.92 tikitiki 126.96 78.18 68.75 The Lojban keyboard layout is a fictional one of my own invention; it is the same as the Dvorak layout but with the apostrophe key interchanged with the H key. Just this small change does seem to have made a big difference. This is probably the only change that could be made without disrupting people's typing too much; since the apostrophe sounds almost like an H anyway it's not that great a change IMHO. Of course, no OS supports it ;). It's encouraging that the figures in each case were so close; implying that these two texts use similar letter patterns perhaps. Incidentally, for a text in English (with some bits in C code) that I wrote: Qwerty Dvorak 123.31 46.27 This text was quite a bit longer, though. Assuming my program's doing a reasonable job, then, the Qwerty layout is just as bad for both languages, the Dvorak layout is better for both, but not as much better for Lojban as it is for English (which I expected, anyway). My {jbobatkymorna} is of course best for Lojban writing :). If anybody is interested in the program, you can download the C source code (very small, zipped) or a DOS binary (26k, also compressed) from this web page: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mert0407/lojban/ I'll try to put some statistics for other documents on that page too, if I have time. The C source ought to compile on almost any C-capable system (Unix, Windows, DOS, etc), but the makefile will need modification for anything other than a DOS system using djgpp. It is a command line utility, which can read an input file, or stdin, outputting to an output file, or stdout, and can switch between keyboard types on the command line. Adding new keyboard layouts, or modifying existing ones for testing, is fairly trivial but requires a rebuild for each. Ditto for changing the scoring system. I'd be interested to hear any comments on these results, the scoring system, or feasibility of using a keyboard layout designed especially for Lojban writing. co'o mi'e djorj -- George Foot Merton College, Oxford