For languages like Geez which consist of a few hundreds of characters in their writing system, it is not possible to assign a unique key on the standard keyboard for each letter of the language. Therefore building an input method editor for such languages requires coming up with a scheme that should pass this limitation, the scheme should take into consideration many qualities from requiring fewer key strokes, to the ease of learning of the key combinations. One such popular scheme used by many input method editors is the phonetic mapping of the English letters to the desired language.
The phonetic key mapping has its strengths and weaknesses, one of the pros is that it provides an easier and faster learning curve of the key combinations, the cons include: it may lead to ambiguity in some cases; this of course varies based on the nature of the language for which it is used.
Comments (45)