From: Karl Pentzlin (karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de)
Date: Wed Jul 05 2006 - 11:13:04 CDT
Am Mittwoch, 5. Juli 2006 um 09:12 schrieb Erkki Kolehmainen:
EK> I believe that a
EK> European, multilingual general purpose keyboard should be intuitively
EK> recognizable and - consequently - easy to learn and use.
Of course, but what is easier to learn is not always easier to use,
and vice versa.
I gave the easiness of use the higher priority when in conflict.
Just two examples:
1.) To type Vietnamese fluent on the keyboard you mentioned:
EK> http://kotoistus.fi/suljetut/kbpropa2r.pdf for the layout
you have to be a virtuoso guitar player to play the three-finger accords for the hoi or the breve.
Using the Europatastatur from www.europatastatur.de,
the only three-finger letter is the relative rare uppercase Ð with stroke, with the D key on the left hand and only the two key combination Shift+AltGR on the right hand.
I miss in your goals mentioned in your specs at
http://kotoistus.fi/avoimet/fi_kbspec_en_luonnos06.pdf :
Cause as little tenosynovitis as possible.
Please do not repeat the mistakes which the original designers of the QWERTY/QWERTZ keyboards made.
2.) Imagine you being not a linguist, but a secretary in a German office (as you may know, the average German speaks a little bit English and no other foreign language.) You have to type some customer names into your form, e.g. "Wałęsa".
With your keyboard, you have to get your looking glass, determine the direction which that silly hook beneath the e is bent to, glare at the accents on your keyboard, determine which hook is bent into the same direction, and then press that key (a three-finger accord, again).
With the Europatastatur, you simply press the "Universal Comma Accent". The only rule you have to learn is: If you have a s with something below, type AltGr+s when you write Turkish, use the comma accent otherwise.
(As it happens, except for the s there are no letters for which more than one of cedilla, ogonek or comma below is applicable in normal office usage - thus the comma accent can be unambiguously assigned.
Linguists enter the accent after the base letter and get the free choice.)
EK> The approach that we have chosen could easily be adapted for use in
EK> other primary language environments as well.
Admittedly, my appoach is definitely for German users used to the German keyboards. If I had to do the design for an international user community, I had done a lot of things otherwise.
Best wishes from Bavaria
Karl Pentzlin
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