[OLPC India] Devanagari Effort

[Manusheel Gupta]

Sayamindu/Joshua,

We appreciate your suggestions/feedback.

We are in the process of taking a decision to figure out the best-fit
solution to position characters on the keycaps.

There are several classes of choices to make:

(A) Keep everything aligned horizontally and vertically or introduce an
offset that will allow for larger glyphs.

(B) Always vertically align to the horizontal stroke of the character,
leaving space above the stroke for those characters that have marks
     above or make a slight modification by sliding the character up
vertically when there is no mark, again making it possible to use larger
     glyphs.


Choices in class B sounds intriguing. But, before we take any decision, we
wish to analyze it by taking almost all possible scenarios into account.

Pointers from your side on this area of concern will be highly appreciated.


Regards,
Manu


 Manusheel Gupta
Technical Consultant/Advisor
One Laptop Per Child Inc.
http://laptop.org








On 10/14/07, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com > wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, 2007-10-14 at 09:08 -0700, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 12:42:50PM +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
>
> <..snipped>
>
> > I learned Inscript and prefer it because it seems more predictable than
> > a phonetic layout. Because of the mismatch between English and
> > Devanagari, you can't easily predict what is phonetic according to the
> > designer of the phonetic layout. However, most of the Indians I've met
> > (I am American) find the phonetic scheme easier to learn.
> >
>
> Yes - there are quite a few "quirks" one needs to get used to while
> working with phonetic layouts. Eg: almost all Indic scripts have at
> least four contenders for the 'T' key, the Devanagari ones being ta,
> tha, tta, and ttha.
>
> > I vote for using Inscript on the keyboard. Even though the learning
> > curve is a bit steeper, it's a more logical layout than any phonetic
> > layout.
> >
>
> Agreed. In fact http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Devanagari_Keyboard suggests
> that Inscript is the chosen layout.
>
> Warm regards,
> Sayamindu
>
>
> --
> Sayamindu Dasgupta
> http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings
>
>
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