Nicholas Bodley <nbodley at speakeasy dot net> wrote:

>> Korean keyboards are arranged logically and ergonomically--a lot
>> easier to learn than the English--because all the consonants are on
>> the left side and the vowels are on the right.
>
> The Dvorak letter layout (strictly, A.S.K.) is much better than
> "qwerty" for English. The middle row is
> A O E U I D H T N S, a true home row.

Matthew Ahn (Ahn Ma Tae), a Korean living in the U.S., developed a 3-set
keyboard layout for Hangul that positions the leading consonants on the
left, the vowels on the right, and the trailing consonants on the bottom
row, neatly paralleling the visual organization of Hangul letters into
syllabic blocks. It's basically the Korean equivalent of Dvorak:
demonstrably better than Kong or 2-set layouts, but not at all widely
used (at least not yet).

Ahn's keyboard does rely on *sequences of keys* to generate certain
letters, and so it can't be used "out of the box" with SC UniPad (see
below), which can use dead keys only for canonically combining
diacritical marks. I've been meaning to check with Ahn to see if an
alternative mechanism, such as Shift and Ctrl+Alt combinations, would be
allowable under his (patented) system.

> There's also a Turkish ("F-type") layout that differs considerably:
> [Created in SC Unipad from Sharmahd Computing, using one of its
> built-in keyboard maps.)

(smiles) I contributed that keyboard to the UniPad project in 2001 or
2002, along with dozens of others.

-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/