Russian Keyboard - Problem

[zxcel]

Hello! I'm from Russia, and I'am interested in Pandora. I want to use it for some typing "on the road".

(I think it will be better for me than Eee Pc because I want to hold it in my hands during typing, not like laptop.)

But there is a problem: our alphabet (called Cyrillic alphabet) consist of 32 letters. Hence, there is not enough keys on Pandora for typing in Russian, Bulgarian,Ukrainian,Serbian, Hungarian, and more than 20 other languages.

There are many interesting and clever guys in this countries. So it will be good to let us use the Pandora. But we need six (or at least four) keys, on "qwerty"-part of keyboard, for comfortable typing.

I will try to show you some keyboard layouts with Cyrillic support, may be it will usefull.

1. Toshiba Portege g900 - PDA with russian keyboard

Russian Letters are printed under English.
a. To change layout from english to russian, there is key "RU" left to SPACE.
b. Some of Russian letters are on keys "["(Ж); ","(Х) ; "." (Ъ);
c. And, letters Э and Ю are on keys Up and Down. If you want to type them, you have to use "symbol" key - green circle, it's in lower-left corner of the keyboard. It's not too comfortable, of course. But, I can live with it

2. Russian keys on ASUS Eee PC

This is standard layout. Russian letters are green, printed under english ones.
1. Letter Х is on key { ; Ъ on } ; Ж on : ; Э on " ; Б on , ; Ю on .
2. Eee PC keyboard is very comfortable (but too big for my purposes)
3. Switching from russian to english - using Ctrl+Shift combination, it's windows standart combination (but special key as in g900 is better).

We, Russian users, will make keyboard layouts for linux ourselves. And there are sticky labels with russian letters for notebooks and pda's, we will stick them, ourselves. But we need six (or at least four) keys , on "qwerty"-part of keyboard, for comfortable typing. Please take our opinions into account.

P.S. By the way, I "found" two new buttons on images of Pandora!)) They are "," and "."! So, we need 4 or at least 2 buttons. It's better

 

[sindbad]

I guess it's possible to map the extra buttons to those missing keys. There are 4 action buttons and 2 shoulder buttons.

 

[trooper]

I guess it's possible to map the extra buttons to those missing keys. There are 4 action buttons and 2 shoulder buttons.

Or the Start, Select and 4 action buttons, For convenience and ease of use when placed on a desk/lap or some other surface.

Trooper

 

[zxcel]

I guess it's possible to map the extra buttons to those missing keys. There are 4 action buttons and 2 shoulder buttons.

Yes. But that keys definitely will be used by most of programs for some standard actions. Hence, it will be not comfortably. And they are rather far from main qwerty part.

By the way, I "found" two new buttons on images of Pandora!)) They are "," and "."! So, we need 4 or at least 2 buttons. It's better

 

[quasist]

But we need six (or at least four) keys , on "qwerty"-part of keyboard, for comfortable typing. Please take our opinions into account.

Listen, folk. They abadoned the holy backspace key. It is a just miracle that they planning the full english charset

 

[zxcel]

I guess it's possible to map the extra buttons to those missing keys. There are 4 action buttons and 2 shoulder buttons.

Or the Start, Select and 4 action buttons, For convenience and ease of use when placed on a desk/lap or some other surface.

Trooper


Again, that keys definitely will be used by most of programs for some standard actions. Hence, it will be not comfortably. And they are rather far from main qwerty part.

 

[Nintendo]

Sorry, but you Russians are screwed then.

 

[_VWV_]

Sorry, but you Russians are screwed then.

No, we aren't!

Those XAYZ buttons won't be used in firefox, word processors.. email clients. So I don't see any problem at all. Yes, it won't be that comfortable to type, as it could have been if they added several buttons, but hey, as it was mentioned, some of the holly buttons are missing.

Yes, there might be some problems with cyliric in games, which use XAYZ. But if I understand the idea of the initial post right, zxcel asks about cyliric in OS, firefox... so on.
I think, we'd better ask whether OS will understand cyliric at all, coz I don't see any problem in mapping several cyliric letters to XAYZ. For example, will I be able to use cyliric in the terminal window?

 

[Arialia]

Sorry, but you Russians are screwed then.

No, we aren't!

Those XAYZ buttons won't be used in firefox, word processors.. email clients. So I don't see any problem at all. Yes, it won't be that comfortable to type, as it could have been if they added several buttons, but hey, as it was mentioned, some of the holly buttons are missing.

Yes, there might be some problems with cyliric in games, which use XAYZ. But if I understand the idea of the initial post right, zxcel asks about cyliric in OS, firefox... so on.
I think, we'd better ask whether OS will understand cyliric at all, coz I don't see any problem in mapping several cyliric letters to XAYZ. For example, will I be able to use cyliric in the terminal window?

No problems if we use UTF8 like Unbuntu and have correct Font cyrillic and i think actions buttons must be good for extra letters

 

[gruso]

Listen, folk. They abadoned the holy backspace key. It is a just miracle that they planning the full english charset
Holy :lol: ...I guess it's holy, if your faith is based on constant errors.

 

[rasczak]

I made some time ago the same question because of extra letters in spanish language. I was answered that keyboard could be remapped and some keys would ad the extra characters using the Function key.

It's a interesting engagement solution, but I'm still thinking in an onscreen keyboard, using the touchscreen.

 

[peca]

We, Czech, have some special characters, but (fortunately) they are made by accent marks. So we need just only 2 special key for accent. I guess that this the same as in French, but different characters, accents and pronunciation. Ie my name Palička was typed as Paliˇcka, where ˇ mark is mapped on some key. We always send some "damn" to the inventor of this hell way of typing, because before him we type by combination latin letters (Paliczka).

OK, let's back to what I want say. On the Czech keyboard are some frequently typed characters mapped on the top numbers keys. Numbers are typed with shift key and other chars {!@#$%^&*()} are typed with AltGr key (or Fn or so on).

You, Russian, think about similar way.

 

[_VWV_]

No problems if we use UTF8 like Unbuntu and have correct Font cyrillic and i think actions buttons must be good for extra letters

This is actually the question. Do you think I'll be able to install the "correct Font"? If I remember right Ubuntu has several "cyrilising" .debs, which you have to install to get full cyliric support. So that it's not there by default. Though I have no idea what those .debs do with the system. Maybe they just set the "correct Font", which can be set manually.
peca
extra buttons don't seem to be a problem .. we will find a solution.

 

[Eolair]

Yes and scandinavian and german languages have å, ä, ö, ß, ü... we should be able to use a combination of several keys to deal with this.... if the japanese start asking for hiragana, katakana and kanji we're screwed though

 

[sindbad]

This is actually the question. Do you think I'll be able to install the "correct Font"? If I remember right Ubuntu has several "cyrilising" .debs, which you have to install to get full cyliric support. So that it's not there by default. Though I have no idea what those .debs do with the system. Maybe they just set the "correct Font", which can be set manually.
peca
I'm running ubuntu and there's no unicode character I can't see properly, all out of the box with the default font. I've had chinese, japanese and macedonian people use this computer on websites with all sorts of characters and they never complaied

 

[zxcel]

You guys convince me. It seems that it is possible to type in russian on pandora. For example, this way:

Б - key ","
Ю - key "."
Х,Ъ,Ж,Э - FN+something, in russian mode. Not comfortable, but so-so. tolerable.
switching between modes - FN+Space, for example
And if 4 action buttons will not be used by programs, it may be easier (but I hope programs will use them, because it is better if programs use all the features of device).

 

[_VWV_]

....because it is better if programs use all the features of device).

Not necessarily. Does an acrobat reader use all key on your keyboard? I guess this is not the case. What for should a browser or an e-mail client or an openoffice-like app use AXYZ keys??? If they should, than a desktop with 105-button keyboard looks less favorable in comparison with the andora1: .. which is true but for other reasons .

 

[atomicthumbs]

The function keys (seeing as there's a lack of AltGr and other things) could probably be used to switch to a layout which could type Cyrillic script.

 

[Esn]

This is the Russian layout that I use on my Latin-character keyboard:

Most of the Russian letters map to their Latin character equivalents, so that leaves me with just a few "extra letters" to memorize.

The letters "Ё" and "Ъ" are not really essential (Е and Ь can substitute for them), so that leaves us with five letters that won't fit into the QWERTY keyboard: Ю, Э, Ь, Ш, Щ.

The "," "Space" and "." buttons are essential for typing, and I don't think that the "Enter", "Fn" or "Shift" buttons should be used either. That still leaves the 4 face buttons and the 3 buttons in the centre. And possibly the number keys. In fact, if those 7 buttons are all free, you could even include the two "unessential" letters.

Frankly, I don't see a problem. Just allow users an easy way to map characters to certain buttons, and let them pick what is most comfortable for them.

 

[zxcel]

This is the Russian layout that I use on my Latin-character keyboard:

Yeah, it's quite compact. But it is not standard (ЙЦУКЕНГ), it's a minus.
+1 for "Space, "," and "." are important".
Ё definitely can be skipped.
If you skip Ъ in your texts, you will look like illiterate man. But, as far as I know, there are no words which started from letters Ь or Ъ, hence we don't need capital Ь and Ъ (only ь and ъ) so we can use one button for both (shift+ь=ъ).