Hi, I wanted to point out that the Kotoistus layout is the basis for the new Finnish keyboard standard, which is being prepared by our workgroup. I was surprised to see the comment "much criticism," since we have been urging people to submit criticism and comments for the past couple of years. If you don't send your criticism to the Kotoistus coordinator, you will not have your voice heard. The kotoistus website is at www.kotoistus.fi.
Martin-Éric, have you considered the "difficulties" in relation to other languages? I understand you are familiar with Estonian and French, so your bias is obviously there. There is nothing wrong with that, of course. However, if you look at the problems you mentioned, you will notice that we considered each one individually, and placed the most common diacritic in the easiest position, with the most common diacritic on the key, the next most common under the shift key, the third most common under Alt-Gr and the fourth one under Alt-Gr and shift. As to the need to write these letters, Finland is a multi-lingual country, albeit many would like to deny this. Sami and Roma languages are two of them, and both have letters which were not producable on the old layouts. In addition, we have a long standing problem of peoples' names being written incorrectly because of old standards which require names to be altered and not get written correctly. With Unicode and the new layout we are now able to record peoples' names correctly. This is a major improvement. There are still other legal hurdles to pass before we have these problems solved, but the keyboard layout was the first and the most obvious obstacle. Finland is now part of the EU. I understand that everyone gives their own languages preference, I certainly do. However, when designing a new keyboard layout, those biases must be put aside, so that one can reach a solution which enables all users to input their own language. The new layout enables all characters in the EU countries' to be input correctly. Efficiency and usability are important. In the real world, however, we must compromise when the interests of two or more groups conflict with each other. Such was the case with the new Finnish keyboard layout. I might also add that there is a project at CEN, called MEEK, to design guidelines for keyboards in the EU, and worldwide, we hope. One of the goals is to help users in Internet cafes and such places. Internet cafes are an interesting meeting place of cultures, where users from various backgrounds, not just EU countries I might add, use the same keyboards for inputting their text. You can imagine the difficulties when trying to input Finnish on a French keyboard, to give you an example. It would be nice to find a common set of rules, so that entering text in any country would be made less complex. The site is at http://www.cen.eu/cenorm/sectors/sectors/isss/activity/ws+meek.asp > The committee behind the new standard also > blatantly ignored memos by fellow multilinguists on what would be a > *usable* new keyboard map. All they were interested in was following > whatever standard the other Scandinavian countries would implement. I can assure you that at least as far as I am concerned (as a member and occasional chairman of the keyboard layout workgroup) this is not true. Troy Korjuslommi http://kotoistus.tksoft.com/linux/index-en.html
