PDF reader not really user friendly...

[david at lang.hm]

On Sat, 26 Jan 2008, Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:

> 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.

but adults are not supposed to be useing these keyboards ;-)

David Lang