Actually, no, Patrick, the shift is only for retroflex consonants.  No shift keypress is required for the conjuncts.  And one is going to have to use *something* to distinguish retroflexes. 

Modern script-rendering software knows all about viramas, which is how it can build a conjunct without having to be told.  If you actually want a virama on the screen, you just type a consonant with a following space (no vowel).  Which seems totally logical to me, and requires no superfluous keypresses.  So typing "karman " -> "कर्मन्"

Basically, every time you type "f", you are doing something you don't need to do, from a technical point of view.  It's a labour overhead imposed by poor software design.

Dominik

--
Dr Dominik Wujastyk
Department of South Asia, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies,
University of Vienna,
Spitalgasse 2-4, Courtyard 2, Entrance 2.1
1090 Vienna, Austria
and
Adjunct Professor,
Division of Health and Humanities,
St. John's Research Institute, Bangalore, India.
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On 13 November 2013 17:00, Patrick Olivelle <jpo@uts.cc.utexas.edu> wrote:

Dominik: 

Actually when you get used to it, it is quite fast and simple. In your case you have to use Shift in order to make conjunct, which also includes an extra keystroke. The reason for "f", I assume, is that Devanāgarī assumes the vowel "a" after a consonant, unless there is a virāma; and "f" has that function. So, if you really want a virāma -- you type the consonant and "f" and give a space. 

Patrick

On Nov 13, 2013, at 9:20 AM, Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm slightly appalled by what I'm hearing about typing "f" in between every conjuncted letter.  That must make typing a terrible pain! 

All our modern operating systems have built-in stuff for making conjuncts automatically by just typing the letters one after another (as in romanization).*  I don't understand why MS Win and OS/X users are doing this other, laborious thing.  Am I missing something obvious?

When I type Devanagari, I type kRSNa and get कृष्ण, kArtsnyam for कार्त्स्न्यम् . 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.  It's handled by software on my system, Ubuntu Linux, called Ibus and m17n (which comes with Devanagari and IAST romanization already pre-defined).

Dominik

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