--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham"
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>

wrote:

>
> > Shift was devised for a particular quirk of contemporary roman,
> > cyrillic, and greek.
>
> Surely shift *exploited* the quirk. Characters vary enormously in
> their frequency, and as think I've already said, the Thai Kedmanee
> keyboard does a reasonable job of keeping the use of the shift key
> low. The Thai Pattchote keyboard does even better. (I can't speak
> for other scripts.)

That was one of the problems with the India standard keyboard used for
Tamil. Since it was set up for Devanagari, most of the freqauently
used letters in Tamil were in the shift state. I read a Tamil review
of that keyboard, which went like this, "I was hunting in the shift
state like a blind man."

However, that is an internal India situation, it just happened that MS
published this keyboard for Tamil before it published the 'Tamil'
keyboard. Still most prefered keyboards for Tamil are 3rd party
downloads. Some imitate typewriter input.

Suzanne