PDF reader not really user friendly...

Sat Jan 26 16:58:54 EST 2008

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david at lang.hm wrote:
> after all the qwerty keyboard layout was designed to slow typing so that 
> the mechanical typewriters could keep up. there are better layouts for 
> typing (even some standardized ones like doevak) but the OLPC ships with 
> the qwerty layout in the US becouse that is the standard.

Weirdly enough, I think that qwerty is actually an advantage for this keyboard.
 Qwerty was designed to avoid having consecutive letters be close to each other
along the left-right axis.  This was done so that the corresponding typewriter
hammers would not interfere.  In the case of the OLPC keyboard, the key pitch is
slightly narrower than the natural spacing between adult fingers, which means
that typing two consecutive letters with two neighboring fingers is difficult.
Qwerty tries to minimize exactly this case.  Dvorak, which attempts to place
digraphs next to each other, might be slower on this size keyboard.

Three cheers for qwerty!

- --Ben
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