This section explores existing keyboard layouts made for the
- Arabic language and analyzes their usability.
+ Arabic language and analyzes their usability.
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+ Comparing them with the proposed layout above is difficult at best,
+ because the layouts presented below cover different character sets.
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+ Some lack numbers, some do not include short vowels and others provide
+ no way to type symbols.
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+ Therefore no individual score is assigned to each layout, but an analysis
+ of each layout’s features is given.
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+ Carpalx tries to minimize the effort of typing in blocks of three
+ consecutive keystrokes, triads, and thus a good layout in that sense
+ should make typing frequent triads easy.
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+ The figure above plots cumulative triad frequency on the x-axis and
+ weighted cumulative effort on the y-axis.
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+ Thus, at an x value of 0.5 the y-axis is the sum of triad frequencies
+ multiplied by their effort for all triads responsible for 50% of the
+ typing process.
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+ Standard layouts are the layouts from ASMO,
+ Linux and OSX whereas
+ usable lists only those which are actually relevant for typing.
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+ As we can see the layout presented above meets the optimization goal.
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+ Only the top 5% of all triads are “easier” to type with Malas’ layout, because lulua splits hamza
+ (ء) from its alef (ا) stem.
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+ As expected the phonetic layout is one of the
+ worst ones, because QWERTY is not optimized for Arabic letter frequencies.
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+ The following sections provide details about these layouts.
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