Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

Love it. To quote myself:
Since it is way to late to change anything drastic to tohkbd without upsetting a lot of people, it is safe to assume this thread is from here on towards thinking about a perfect layout for rev3/j2rev1.

Do not forget to post pictures or whatever (even excel will do), but saying 'i want that with this and this but not that' does not speak to the very visually oriented mind of a hardware designer ;)

Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

Sure, but I just tried to do a very basic adaptation of english qwerty, to ease to get it done. It's just an english + some symbols without touching anything from the original design. Obviously, your proposal is better for an independent design.

Re: Ideal keyboard.. bi- and trilingual variants
 

Your design of a bilingual Qwerty layout makes sense. It adds Spanish to the Qwerty, but does not make it any worse for English texts. Such a qwerty variant would be ideal for North America, for example

I believe that a trilingual layout can be modified from keyboards like TOHKBD rev. 2. By adding to their dedicated keys the Ç and Ñ characters and the dead-key accents of the Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan languages, as well as¿ ¡ ª º · characters as the combinations with the blue "Chr" key, the same keyboard would be suitable for Spain and Portugal, as well as practically all Latin America. The keyboard might be suitable also for French texts (but for French it would be more limited and less standard than the Canadian bilingual Qwerty, for example). Naturally also English could be written easily on the Spanish+Portuguese+Catalan Qwerty variant. I may publish my draft in the thread of http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=94303

Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

So, any improvement doable to this design fos spanish/catalan/portuguese layout adaptation on english qwerty one?. Obviously a totally new arrangement would be ideal, but I am trying to get the best posible modification over tohkbd qwerty layout.

If there is nothing more to add/quit/move I will ask wazd to make the vector file for laser engraving.

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7539/...8ffa18f3_o.jpg

Layout in libreoffice format

Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

I will later check and comment this layout. But please make this minor change:
Change the accent above the F label to the genuine accent acute symbol: ´. It has the unicode 00B4 (and at least on WIndows PC) it can be entered with Alt + 0180. Whether the accent acute is reproduced correctly may depend a bit about the font used.
But now in your draft it looks like the apostrophe.

Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

To make the "Masculine ordinal indicator" º confuse less with "superscrift o" and Degree Sign, and to make the "Feminine Ordinal Indicator" confuse less with "Superscript a", please use a suitable font for the printing of those two key labels. The difference can be seen best by using the Calibri or Cambria font for the º ª letters: there is a line below the º and ª.

Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

Thanks Egon, I got implemented your suggestions and made a change. Acute accent is more used than umlaut or even ñ or ç, so I put in a key where can be gotten directly without pressing a especial key previously. It is the same place used in N900 spanish layout.

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8633/...ee676ee0_n.jpg

There is a space under the at symbol which I suppose that could be used too.

Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

Thanks, malkavian. You changes are welcome improvements.
While this layout already works as a good "Pan-American" keyboard variant (English + Spanish + Portuguese + French + Italian), it works also as a quite useful "ad hoc" keyboard also for the Catalan, Finnish, Estonian and German languages, if the TOHKBD owner prefers to get a primarily English layout (exception: the German "double s" ß is missing, or for the German, perhaps the Ñ key could work as the ß key; the ß does not need to be printed on that key). The layout and key labels work fine also for the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian languages, if a suitable SW driver is provided ("Swedish add-on for English layout", for example). For the "Scandinavian" å and Å ("A with ring above") can you find the "ring above" dead-key accent on the keyboard?. Yes you can: it is printed on the M key (although it works as the º (masculine ordinal indicator) for the Spanish, Portuguesem Catalan and Italian languages, the SW driver can make it work as the "ring above dead-key accent" if you have chosen Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic or Finnish as the text-input language (but perhaps we can omit the "Icelandic add-on SW driver for English layout", because you cannot find the Þ and ð letters on the keyboard). For Estonian, the õ letter can be implemented like for the Portuguese, and ü letter can be implemented like for the German language.

Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

Fine, approved then. I doubt that a french or german speaker use this having a TOHKBD layout specific for them... Sending it to http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=94303 for getting vector file for it.

Re: Ideal keyboard design and configuration
 

OK. Actually I believe that also for all the languages that I listed (except English), the use of the English + Spanish + Portuguese + Catalan layout would be limited mainly to ad-hoc needs: it is good to be able to write also the listed languages on the primarily English keyboard. I also believe that also a genuine Spanish + Portuguese + Catalan TOHKBD will be needed. In my previous comments I've written something about them, and will later suggest a new layout for them. Just now I'm too busy with my other activities and hobbies.
Anyway, your layout will be good first aid for Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Italian texts.