Possible to add new precomposed characters for local language in Togo?

[Philippe Verdy]

And this is demonstrated since long by the epxerience of alternate
"ergonomic" layouts, used by very few people.

Even without fundamentally changing the layout (e.g. with keyboards in two
parts in V), many people don't like them and prefer the traditional one.
There are still some device using a pure alphabetic layout but many people
criticized it (including in France, when the early Minitel -a text-only
teminal for online services and precursor of today's Internet in France-
used it in its first version: even if its keyboard was really horrible and
made on purpose to type slowly, rapidly it changed to the AZERTY layout).

The only revolution did not came from mechanical keyboards but from
touch-on-screen layouts, to reduce the number of visible keys to leave
space on the screen.

Before that, there was the T9 keyboard on the first smartphones, but here
again this had not the success, as it was really bad and extremely slow to
type without errors. Touch-screen layouts have also kept the basic layout
of letters of mechanical keyboards, even if they've suppressed many keys by
using a new "mode" key for typing digits, punctuations, symbols or emojis.
However touch-screen layouts have successfully integrated all the
characters that people wanted, including letters with diacritics that were
missing on mechanical keyboards, because their layout is dynamic and all
labels are visible.

But even on these layouts, typing the common letters with diacritics is
still slow compared to traditional keyboards, even with dictionary-based
wizards that propose words (it is still a nightmare to type a strong
password, dictionary-based assistants offer little help or create errors),
or to program something in a computing language, because it needs much more
frequent punctuations and symbols or because not everything is a true
linguistic word.

It is then acceptable to slightly adapt a layout with minor changes,
provided that basic letters and common punctuation are still at the same
place and don't require pressing new combinations of keys (only acceptable
for less frequent letters).

We'll continue to live for long with the 3 basic layouts for Latin (QWERTY,
AZERTY, QWERTZ). And nothing will really change without a strong national
standard that will convince manufacturers to propose it at normal prices,
and force software vendors to include it in the builtin layouts for their
OSes.



2016-02-23 18:25 GMT+01:00 Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org>:

> Philippe Verdy wrote:
>
> > There will remain a resistance for the base layout of letters
> > (basically QWERTY vs. AZERTY vs QWERTZ) and basic punctuation
>
> Philippe is absolutely right here. Most of us on this list are
> character-set and i18n wonks, and some of us have customized our own
> keyboard layouts, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking we
> represent ordinary users. Many people are emotionally tied to a
> particular keyboard layout and become very confused when faced with
> something different. Trying to persuade them to adopt a "universal"
> keyboard, so they can type characters in a language they may not know,
> is an exercise in social frustration.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO ����
>
>
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