Re: {le logjji batkyta'o morna} logical keyboard layouts

[Karen Stein <CloversImp@AOL.COM>]

In a message dated 97-10-09 08:00:11 EDT, George Foot wrote:


> coi rodo

<snip disc. of lojban for keyboard>

> 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.
<snip results>
> 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.

<snip>

> 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.