I was watching a real life international murder mystery program on…uh…history channel? TLC? I dunno, somewhere in that area…and forget about the murder mystery stuff.
They were showing an Arab type person using a computer with the standard QWERTY keyboard, but the info he typed on his screen was in arabic. ( At least I thought it was.)
So’s, I start to think…Whattabout chinese keyboards and all the 1000’s of characters their language has.
ARe their any furren dopers who can answer my mental pause?
An Iraqi friend of mind once needed to use my Mac and my Pagemaker to make some last-minute edits to a book his mother wrote. The book’s text was in Arabic.
He just installed a few Arabic fonts on my Mac, and went about his merry way. Liberal use of the Shift, Option, and “Apple” keys was required to represent medial and final forms.
Japanese and Chinese can be written by assigning Roman letters to phones. When you type a syllable sequence you might be presented withh a choice of characters that match that sequence. Japanese Kana, of course, can be assigned one-to-one to keys. Indian languages don’t have capital letters, so you have twice as many options open to assign to letters. Combining forms can be assigned either to option and ctrl combinations or one clever program makes the “a” key the “connector” key that automatically calls forth the conjoined forms.
Do you want to know about Arabic (see subject) or Chinese (see body) ?
I’ve seen an Arabic word processor used with a standard keyboard which is really interesting because Arabic letters change form depending on whether they’re at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. The word process has to dynamically change form of stuff you’ve already typed. Keyboard-wise Arabic is no big deal since the number of letters is not much different than English (I forget the exact number).
For Japanese, it’s possible to type one kana per keystroke, but most people type in romaji (roman letters), and the computer converts it to Japanse/Chinese characters as they go. Arabic probably works on the same principle.
Since there are many kanji characters with the same pronunciation, getting the computer to give you the right one can be a challenge at times (especially if you’re trying to enter someone’s name). The conversion programs have gotten pretty sophisticated in recent years, though. Most of them now will keep track of what characters you use and try to offer what they think you’re most likely to want based on your past usage.
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