Re: Letter frequency in unicode (Was Re: [Indic-computing-devel] Free UCS outline font)

[Dr. U.B. P. <pav...@vi...>]

> People at Prajavani (a leading Kannada daily) have done the frequency
> > analysis for Kannada letters looooooooong ago. They had even
> designed > their Montype Kannada layout based on these data.
> 
> Did they publish their findings somewhere ?

I tried to hunt for it. But could not get hold. So many people have 
changed during these many years at their technical section and nobody 
knows about the whereabouts of that data.

> 
> > Now all these have 
> > gone due to the advent of GoK (Govt of Karnataka) standard Kannada
> > keyboard layout (also know as KGP (Kannada Ganaka Parishat) std).
> 
> Did the KGP keyboard take into account such analyses ? I'm sure it's
> easy to use for people already comfortable with qwerty.

No. KGP/GoK keyboard is based on QWERTY. Except for Z,X,Q,W and the f 
(link key) keys all othe rkeys are intuitive for those who are 
familiar with QWERTY. For ex, k is for ka, K is for Kha, etc. For 
those people who use Englsih as well as Kannada, this keyboard layout 
becomes very easy.

KGP layout is not totally invented by KGP. It was originally by KP 
Rao and was modified slightly by KGP. KP Rao is 80+ years of age now, 
but still active. He is currently with his daughter in Delhi. I am in 
touch with him about our common interests.

> If the world didn't have qwerty or English and you were (the Indian)
> Sholes designing a keyboard for kannada, how would you design it ?

Probably I would have designed it very close to the Monotype layout 
once used by Prajavani. 

> > I hope everyone remembers the story about QWERTY keyboard that we
> > use for English. It was designed to make typing SLOW rather than
> > FAST ;-)
> 
> Qwerty isn't the unchallenged king of the keyboard universe. I
> recently bumped into Dvorak:

I am aware of another layout by IBM. It was called something EBC... I 
had used it during my card-punching days at BARC. It was far superior 
to qwerty, but it died.

Rgds,
Pavanaja
-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. U.B. Pavanaja
Editor, Vishva Kannada
World's first Internet magazine in Kannada
http://www.vishvakannada.com/

Note: I don't worry about pselling mixtakes