#WIJESEKARA KEYBOARD LAYOUT PDF FILES FULL#
#WIJESEKARA KEYBOARD LAYOUT PDF FILES SOFTWARE#
#WIJESEKARA KEYBOARD LAYOUT PDF FILES CODE#
#WIJESEKARA KEYBOARD LAYOUT PDF FILES WINDOWS#

#WIJESEKARA KEYBOARD LAYOUT PDF FILES SOFTWARE#

2002 Siyabasa sinhala typing software is released. 1998 SLS1134/Unicode standards released by CINTEC for the first time.

#WIJESEKARA KEYBOARD LAYOUT PDF FILES WINDOWS#

1997 Helewadana for Windows developed by Microimage (Pvt) Ltd and Harsha Punasinghe. 1994/1996 Samanala Transliteration Scheme developed by Prasad Dharmasena. 1989 “WadanTharuwa” (means WordStar in Sinhala) developed by the University of Colombo. Milestones in Sinhalese Text Entry 1985 CINTEC establishes a committee for the use of Sinhala & Tamil in Computer Technology. T9), would provide too many ambiguous words to make it effective for Sinhalese text entry. Furthermore, due to the high number of possible characters per key and the high number of possible words for a given key sequence, popular mobile text entry methods, such as disambiguating keypads (e.g. Since there are sixty base characters and thirteen vowels (plus vowel variants), dividing all these keys among a numerical keypad would be difficult. Work addressing Sinhalese text entry for mobile devices is very minimal. A single incorrect key press can result in a completely different transliteration result. The latter is particularly important, as the transliteration process is highly sensitive to errors. This is a better way of achieving faster Sinhalese typing on a keyboard for users who are familiar with typing in English, but this too has its limitations, such no word prediction and no error correction. In Singlish, a key on the English keyboard is mapped to a Sinhalese character in Unicode by direct transliteration. Singlish, as the name suggests, means Sinhalese through English. The Wijesekara keyboard layout.Ī later approach was the Realtime Singlish Unicode Converter. It is plausible that this mapping inconsistency causes an increase in error rate for users familiar with typing in English.įigure 2. Those users expect the Sinhalese “K” to be displayed when the “K” key on the US keyboard is pressed. This causes problems for users who are already familiar with typing in English. the letter “K” in the keyboard is mapped to the Sinhalese equivalent character of “N”). One such keyboard-based input method for the Sinhalese language is the Wijesekara keyboard (Figure 2), which simply assigns the Sinhalese base characters and vowel variants onto a standard US keyboard using a different keyboard mapping (i.e. Today, suboptimal methods of text entry are commonly used in countries such as Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese characters in the Unicode character tables. Therefore, Indo-Aryan languages’ text entry methods were not invented to fit the languages, but rather copied from the Western world and naïvely applied with little focus on creating an optimal text entry experience for users.įigure 1. Indo-Aryan languages are based in the Eastern world, mostly in third world countries where technology arrives three, four, or even ten years after it has matured in the West.

#WIJESEKARA KEYBOARD LAYOUT PDF FILES CODE#

Morse code was made for the English alphabet). Accordingly, text entry methods were designed to target western languages and alphabets (e.g. The designs of keyboards, numeric keypads, and touchscreens were mostly innovations of the West, invented by the people who had written and communicated using Western languages. The language was not designed or optimised for typewriting, word-processing, or to be entered via a computer. Sinhalese was designed to be written with pen or pencil (originally quills or chalk).

#WIJESEKARA KEYBOARD LAYOUT PDF FILES FULL#

Sinhalese sentences can also be very long: a single sentence can occupy a full paragraph with no punctuation, and without violating any grammar rules. The language itself features a greater diversity of rich and complex contextual phrases and idioms than many Western languages. Sinhalese has sixty base characters in the alphabet, with each character having thirteen variations when combined with vowels (Figure 1). For example, the Sinhalese language is spoken, read and written by over twenty-two million people worldwide including almost all the citizens of Sri Lanka. Indo-Aryan languages are known for their complex alphabets, syllables, and grammars. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.Ĭopyright is held by the author/owner(s). Per Ola Kristensson University of St Andrews Sinhalese falls into the Indo-Aryan family of languages, along with Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit and other languages.Īuthor Keywords Text entry Sinhalese Language modeling This position paper outlines the background, related work and the challenges of implementing an efficient text entry method for the Sinhalese language. Western languages and alphabets dominate the text entry field. Developing Efficient Text Entry Methods for the Sinhalese Language Shyam Reyal University of St Andrews St Andrews, UK Keith Vertanen Montana Tech

Wijesekara keyboard layout pdf files