KEYBOARD LAYOUT FOR DOTTED ALPHABET LANGUAGES

Ever needed to type in Arabic one day but got bamboozled by the available keyboard layouts for the Arabic alphabet? To you, the QWERTY typist, did such layouts block you from typing and expressing yourself in Arabic, let alone learning and mastering them?

If you ever felt your hands are somewhat crippled when typing in Arabic then you are not alone. I have gone through the same horrible experiences where I needed to write a few articles or even passages in Arabic, but felt helpless and frustrated by the turtle speed I managed to type at. It would take a whole day to type one page when I needed to. I conducted a survey for the past couple of years among 10's of Arabic and non-Arabic typists only to arrive to the expected: Utmost frustration with existing layouts. Namely, I asked the questions and got the answers you see next, consistently.


Out of pure and personal need, I envisioned a great way to solve this problem and I implemented it. Trusted friends have tried it and have promptly converted the first time they used it. Once the invention is protected, you should be able to use it, freely I hope, to start a new and positive experience in typing and interacting with the computer in Arabic. If you are a QWERTY typist, you won't want to go back to your old Arabic layout, guaranteed. What's interesting is that KLDAL (Keyboard Layout for Dotted Alphabet Languages) should prove to be a pinnacle solution to all languages whose alphabets are dotted and are scripted from right to left. For example, a good percentage of the Arabic alphabet letters have dots, glottal marks and diacritics above and below them [1]. On the other hand, languages that are scripted from right to left such as Urdu, Persian, and Sindhi, just to name a few, also known as Complex Text Languages (CTL) would be among the most fortuned by the approaches followed in KLDAL. Computation-wise, and since the average length of a word in Arabic is over four letters [2], 77% of the CPU fan-spinning computation of cutting, copying and pasting large volumes of text will also be saved; this is due to a subtle, yet significant adjustment that current keyboard layouts have been oblivious to with regards to languages whose alphabet letters are cursively connected. So, hopefully hundreds of millions of computer users and computer CPU's would benefit from KLDAL just the same. Vague enough? All will be clear one day soon.

So, what is my pledge to you with KLDAL? Well, assuming you are a QWERTY touch-typist or at least know where every key on the keyboard is, and that you type say n words per minute, where n is anywhere from 10 to take your best shot, then I pledge to you that within minutes of typing using KLDAL, you will be typing in your own CTL at the rate of n words per minute, period! Imagine how this would change your typing experience, Internet surfing and searching, using email applications and Google Translate (wouldn't you agree that the latter is a job half-cooked thus far! I think the "beta-version" suffix they had in there is removed far too early), etc.

Sounds interesting? I hope so, because I am putting a lot of weight onto this. Email me a about your current experiences with existing layouts and I would post them here for the interested; I will add you to the list of early-bird spectators to new developments with KLDAL as a result.


[1] See the ALFA page for more information on Arabic letters

[2] Full letter frequency analysis is conducted on the Quran: ALWFA counts 77799 words made up of 330733 letters, giving an average word length of 4.25 character / word. See the Quran Sura Statistics page for more details.

You can always reach me at mmadi@intellaren.com.