[INDOLOGY] Devanagari keyboard

[Robert Zydenbos]

It seems that the ongoing struggle in India to reach keyboard standards 
led to three basic systems.

One is Inscript, which has been adapted for all Indian scripts and has 
its own internal logic, but is a headache to learn. कृष्ण is typed 
"k=<fC". There you have the notorious 'f'.

Then there's the Baraha system: "kRiShNa".

The Gov. of Karnataka supports the keyboard layout of the Kannada Ganaka 
Parishad (KGP), where it would be ಕೃಷ್ಣ "kRxfN". This is a kind of 
adaptation of Inscript keeping the English layout (which most typists 
and computer users already have learnt) in mind, and this seems to be 
the basis of the Mac "***-QWERTY" layouts. At first sight this looks not 
very intuitive, but after a very short learning period it does prove to 
be efficient -- because you don't need to type all those Indic short 
a's. :-)

Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

> [...] It's the same whatever program I'm using,  because the
> keyboard/language stuff is handled by the operating system, not each
> individual program.  As far as I know, anyhow.

That's what i don't understand about Patrick Olivelle's remark that the 
keyboard layout doesn't work with MS Word. For me it only further 
underscores that Word is simply not a good program (on the Mac I use 
LibreOffice. No problems whatsoever).

> It's handled by software
> on my system, Ubuntu Linux, called Ibus and m17n (which comes with
> Devanagari and IAST romanization already pre-defined).

Actually, on my Scientific Linux (Red Hat derivative) computer, I use 
the KGP layout for Kannada in Ibus, for the reason given above.

Robert