Date: Mon, 13 Oct 1997 16:09:24 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710132109.QAA13272@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: CloversImp@AOL.COM Sender: Lojban list From: Karen Stein Subject: Re: {le logjji batkyta'o morna} logical keyboard layouts X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2206 X-From-Space-Date: Mon Oct 13 16:09:48 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU In a message dated 97-10-09 08:00:11 EDT, George Foot wrote: > coi rodo > 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. > 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 ;). I see no reason that programmers, at least, in the lojban community could not rewrite keyboard assignment programs that change from Querty to Dvorak so they accept this change. I know that on the Mac, at least, this is trivial with the right software. Again, however, there is the question of the worth of a new keyboard layout that is seriously uncommon. Also, until someone primarily types in lojban, as Andrew hopes to do, such a keyboard would cause problems because of the more difficult reach for the 'h'. George, statistics on english text, for example, using the lojban keyboard would be interesting. People could then decide whether to use the better placement for the appostrophe or the 'h'. > It's encouraging that the figures in each case were so close; implying that these two texts use similar letter patterns perhaps. > 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 :). karis.