Hei Edward and Saymundu<br><br>There is some thing terribly wrong with the character mapping as it stands on the db file. That is mapping the first letter (as it is known geez in Amharic) to the lower case characters in Latin scripts. Mapping this way almost doubles the amount of key strokes needed to type a word or a sentence. <br>
Please see <a href="http://keyboards.ethiopic.org/specification/">http://keyboards.ethiopic.org/specification/</a><br>Most amharic keyboard maping systems in the market today (including keyman) fallow the above specification. <br>
Unfortunately there is no official standard in this regard in Ethiopia yet. but the SERA mapping system which the above specification is based, is not only supported by a well documented study on lingustic and ergonomic principles, it has become also a defacto standard due to it's wide use in almost all amharic software, especially thos that comply to UNICODE charactor encoding. <br>
Unfortunately the amharic keyboard mapping on SCIM M17N is done by some one who have littel familiarity with amharic language long time ago and should have been replaced by now. <br>I am using the KMFL <a href="http://kmfl.sourceforge.net/">http://kmfl.sourceforge.net/</a> on SCIM for my amharic needs in linux.<br>
<br>I belive this mistake has to be corrected as soon as possible before going to any test.<br><br>thanks<br>tegegne<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Edward Cherlin <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:echerlin@gmail.com">echerlin@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I forwarded this to an Ethiopian mailing list to ask for testers.<br>
<div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"><br>
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 9:42 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <<a href="mailto:sayamindu@gmail.com">sayamindu@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> Hello,<br>
> I just uploaded a M17N keyboard layout definition for Amharic, which<br>
> should address <a href="http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8494" target="_blank">http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8494</a><br>
> The m17n db file is at <a href="http://dev.laptop.org/%7Esayamindu/am-olpc.mim" target="_blank">http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/am-olpc.mim</a><br>
><br>
> It would be awesome if someone who knows Amharic can test this out.<br>
> If you are a SCIM-m17n user, please copy this file to /usr/share/m17n<br>
> and select the appropriate method from your scim input method list.<br>
><br>
> Thanks,<br>
> Sayamindu<br>
> --<br>
> Sayamindu Dasgupta<br>
> [<a href="http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings" target="_blank">http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings</a>]<br>
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