{"id":626,"date":"2024-07-21T15:06:23","date_gmt":"2024-07-21T15:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/?p=626"},"modified":"2024-07-21T21:34:11","modified_gmt":"2024-07-21T21:34:11","slug":"optimised-malagasy-keyboard-version-3-0","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/?p=626","title":{"rendered":"Optimised Malagasy Keyboard (version 3.0)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> 
<a href="https://accessity.org/contact/">https://accessity.org/contact/</a> This blog post is the follow-up post about this older post from 2016: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/?p=360\">Finding an optimised keyboard for Malagasy<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://digitalfilms.cat/educacion/">Amoxicillin 500mg Buy Online</a> I wrote that post back in November 2016 about how inefficient the AZERTY keyboard &#8212; currently in use by most Malagasy people &#8212; was. It has an abysmal performance and may even lead to finger joints problem after extensive use over the years.<\/p>\n<h1>Feedback from first versions<\/h1>\n<p> 
<a href="https://grenzzonederm.com/disclaimer/">https://grenzzonederm.com/disclaimer/</a> After spending a few days iterating over layouts, I came up with a first version that scored really well with the test corpus, and even used it for a couple years, but besides it being not popular at all, it suffered some flaws:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Accented characters in Malagasy are OK, but accented letters in French, which is also used by most Malagasy people using a computer, were severely lacking<\/li>\n<li>Programming was hard as some characters such as the anti slash were not present.<\/li>\n<li>Money symbols like the Euro or the Pound were absent. While not a major inconvenience, their absence can sometimes be felt when writing in about the UK (use of Pound Sterling) or France (which uses Euro), for instance.<\/li>\n<li>The characters &#8220;&lt;&#8221; and &#8220;&gt;&#8221; were not type-able on certain keyboards, including the laptop I was using back in 2017.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> 
<a href="https://www.campingatlantide.com/lynos/"></a> After having spend a couple years getting used to the first iteration and noting its flaws, I have come up with another version, which takes some improvements suggested by Ian Douglas (see comments on the older post).<\/p>\n<h1>Version 3<\/h1>\n<p> 
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<a href="https://fieldenddental.com/530-2/">Order Ambien Online</a> So this Keyboard basically is a major change compared to the previous iteration, as several keys have been moved or swapped. Most notably<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The U key is now moved to the right-hand side of the keyboard. U is not used in native words<\/li>\n<li>The Apostrophe and Double quote has been moved to the left side of the keyboard. The most common word using the apostrophe is\u00a0<em><strong> <a href="https://www.indicold.com/about-us/">https://www.indicold.com/about-us/</a> amin&#8217;ny<\/strong><\/em> which would allow us here to type it by alternating left and right hands.<\/li>\n<li>the accented O has its own key. Like accented letters in French, \u00d4 is not a considered a separate letter but it&#8217;s often used.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Analysis Results<\/h2>\n<p> 
<a href="https://www.soundcontrolroom.com/services/design/">https://www.soundcontrolroom.com/services/design/</a> When accessing the <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/keyboard-layout-analyzer\/#\/load\/qdfTBq9h\">analysis results<\/a>, we have the following winners:<\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://www.indicold.com/our-team/">Zolpidem Online Order</a> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-627 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot_20240721_175407.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"354\" height=\"207\" \/><\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://fancyfrites.com/about/">https://fancyfrites.com/about/</a> The heatmap for the Version 3 is as follows:<\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://fieldenddental.com/invisalign/">https://fieldenddental.com/invisalign/</a> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-628 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot_20240721_175528.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"767\" height=\"269\" \/><\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://www.derekduck.com/healthcare_apparel/">https://www.derekduck.com/healthcare_apparel/</a> The row usage is as follows<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-629 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot_20240721_175833.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"514\" height=\"234\" \/><\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://blackbullextremehoney.com/black-bull-extreme-honey-a-powerhouse-for-mens-vitality/">Order Xanax No Prescription</a> Below is the hand usage for our sample text based on\u00a0<em>Sarasara Tsy Ambaka<strong> <a href="https://www.derekduck.com/contact-us/">https://www.derekduck.com/contact-us/</a> .\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>It heavily favours the left hand against the right hand as Malagasy uses a lot of vowels, which are all on the left hand side of the home row right below the user&#8217;s fingers.<\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://grenzzonederm.com/season-1/"></a> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-630\" src=\"http:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot_20240721_175958.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"522\" height=\"224\" \/><\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://www.soundcontrolroom.com/services/design/">Buy Tramadol 100 Mg Online</a> The piechart above is obtained by having the left thumb hit the spacebar. We can swap that with the right thumb and have the result below for the Malagasy v3:<\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://icnany.org/contact/">https://icnany.org/contact/</a> <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-637 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot_20240721_183709.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"336\" height=\"283\" \/><\/p>\n<p> 
<a href="https://www.campingatlantide.com/pere-noel/">Buy Zanaflex Online Without Prescription</a> Hand usage is not a lot more balanced. Space bar accounted for roughly 13% of all keyboard hits in the sample text I used.<\/p>\n<h3>On multilingual typing<\/h3>\n<p> 
 The most used language pair in Madagascar when it comes to multilingual typing is Malagasy and French, or more likely French and Malagasy. Office workers use most often French as a work language, and use Malagasy for other everyday communication. When it comes to bilingual usage, here is how the Malagasy v3.0 keyboard performs. The tests were made with a 5,000 character text in French appended with another 5,000 characters in Malagasy. Informational density per character is higher in French than in Malagasy: in French we have an average of 6 characters per word whereas in Malagasy we are closer to 10. Nevertheless, the passage has been truncated.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/keyboard-layout-analyzer\/#\/load\/NZPqmtZ6\">Here are the detailed results.<\/a> I will present the most interesting parts here.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-644 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot_20240721_234711.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"503\" height=\"270\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The v3 is still the winner here, but as you can see, the difference between the winner and the second no longer seem to be significant, so let&#8217;s use another metric:<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-645 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot_20240721_235008.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"721\" height=\"175\" \/><\/p>\n<p>In the table above, we have the distance covered by our fingers dancing on the keyboard, in centimetres, the less, the better.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s start with the loser here, the AZERTY layout (will this AZERTY-bashing post ever stop?), with over 33,000 centimetres for ten thousand characters, where the left pinky and the index fingers travel a lot. If these were metres and not centimetres, that&#8217;s 75% of a marathon.<\/p>\n<p>A surprising-but-not-so-surprising contender here is the BEPO layout which already has some notoriety and nice total distance of 17,241 centimetres which makes writing 10,000 characters look less like a marathon and more like 40%, of a marathon. Good runners could run 40% of a marathon on a weekday after a day of work.<\/p>\n<p>Malagasy v1.0 also gets away with 16,765 cm<\/p>\n<p>Malagasy v2.2 and v3 are all quite close to each other with respectively 15,901 cm and 15,299 cm. Version 3 has some nice keymaps allowing it to type some keys that were absent in version 2.<\/p>\n<h3>On shortcuts<\/h3>\n<p>We office workers like to use shortcuts. The most famous being Ctrl+A (select all), Ctrl+C (copy), Ctrl+F (search in file), Ctrl+K (cut line after cursor), Ctrl+N (new file), Ctrl+S (save),\u00a0Ctrl+U (cut line before cursor), Ctrl+V (paste), Ctrl+X (cut), Ctrl+Z (cancel last action),<\/p>\n<p>Where do we stand about these for the Malagasy Keyboard v3?<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-646 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/07\/Screenshot_20240722_000606.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"794\" height=\"279\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Well, here we gotta use both control keys, of use two hands if we don&#8217;t want to do that.<\/p>\n<h1>Conclusion<\/h1>\n<p>Finding the optimal combination is very much a work-in-progress, but the version 3 has already come a long way. I especially need to find a way to re-balance right hand and left hand usage, but that won&#8217;t be easy given how we use vowels.<\/p>\n<h2>See also<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/?p=360\">Finding an optimised keyboard for Malagasy<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/radomd92\/klavie-malagasy\">Github repository<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This blog post is the follow-up post about this older post from 2016: Finding an optimised keyboard for Malagasy I wrote that post back in November 2016 about how inefficient the AZERTY keyboard &#8212; currently in use by most Malagasy people &#8212; was. It has an abysmal performance and may even lead to finger joints &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/?p=626\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Optimised Malagasy Keyboard (version 3.0)&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5,24,28,33],"class_list":["post-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","tag-africa","tag-languages","tag-malagasy","tag-solosaina"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651,"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions\/651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terakasorotany.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}