Keyboard Layouts

To type Quikscript on computers, we must first assign its letters to keys on the keyboard. The community is in near-unanimous disagreement on how this should be done—both in terms of how to assign the letters to keys, and how to convert our keypresses into Quikscript characters.

This page gives an overview of the problem and my personal solution to it.

On this page:

• Motivation
• FriedOrange layout
• Rationale for the FriedOrange layout

Motivation

The ASCII-based character encodings documented on the Character encodings page require no special software to use; any text rendered with the appropriate font will appear in Quikscript letters. This was convenient before Unicode was in widespread use—with the limited number of unique characters that software could handle at the time—but breaks compatibility with the conventional Latin alphabet.

To allow the two scripts to coexist more harmoniously, the Quikscript letters were moved to the Unicode Private Use Area (PUA). Our computer keyboards are normally limited to the ASCII range, however, so to make use of the new encoding we must install a custom keyboard layout.

Next comes the problem of designing such a keyboard layout. It seems that this is heavily affected by personal preference: by my count, no less than eleven schemes have been proposed on the Quikscript Group on Groups.io; plus King Kong, QuikEBEO, my personal layout and the seven de facto layouts historically used by fonts (see Character encodings).

Most schemes place the Quikscript letters on keys according to their sound, chiefly differing on the compromises necessary for squeezing 44 letters onto 26 keys. King Kong does not follow that paradigm: instead, it employs all four rows of keys, allowing for one Quikscript letter per key (similar to the Shavian typewriter). By avoiding frequent use of the Shift key, this should make for more comfortable typing—but will require more time to learn.

FriedOrange layout

New in Version 3: the position of  has swapped with , and  has swapped with . The name-dot · is now typed with the grave accent ` key and the angled brackets   no longer require the use of the right Alt key.

I designed this layout so that it could be easily memorised by ensuring that each character mapping is as intuitive as possible—see the detailed explanation below for the logic behind my choices. It aims to prevent some of the mistakes I often made while using Version 1 and be slightly faster to type than Version 2.

The Windows installation packages were made with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and the macOS bundles were made with SIL Ukelele. The source files for the layouts are included, so you can modify them.

Installation

To install the keyboard layouts, first extract the ZIP files to a folder on your computer. On Windows, simply run setup.exe. On macOS, navigate to "/Library/Keyboard Layouts" with the Finder and move the .bundle files there. Now the layouts may be enabled in Keyboard Preferences > Input Sources (click the + button to add a new input). On Linux, follow the instructions in README.txt.

Once set up, you may easily switch between the custom layouts and your original standard one using the button which will appear on the right-hand side of the taskbar (in Windows) or the menu bar (in macOS):

In Windows 8 and 10, you can also use the keyboard shortcut Windows key+Space to switch between the installed layouts. In macOS, a similar shortcut may be enabled through Keyboard Preferences > Shortcuts > Input Sources. Similar buttons and keyboard shortcuts should be available on Linux, too, but the details will differ between distributions and desktop environments.

Shavian edition

The older Shavian alphabet has gone through a similar progression from ASCII-based encodings to the Unicode PUA, and now has its own block in the official Unicode character set. I have adapted my Quikscript keyboard layout to suit it. Please note that this significantly differs from the “standard” Shavian layout developed by the online community in the late 1990s; as far as I know, it was widely accepted (unlike any single Quikscript layout).

Rationale for the FriedOrange layout

Although no Quikscript letter corresponds one-to-one with any Latin letter, most have fairly well-associated counterparts if we only consider the most typical sound value of each Latin letter. The following mappings, therefore, should come naturally to most English speakers. See how the traditional “short” vowels are are typed without the Shift key (shown here as lower case), and their “long” counterparts shifted (upper case):

Most of the remaining Quikscript letters are typically associated with digraphs (pairs of letters) in the Latin alphabet, such as th, sh, ch, wh, ng, and ll. To these we may add the voiced equivalents dh and zh, seen in some phonemic-spelling schemes. Pleasingly, · matches · in being typed unshifted, with the rest shifted:

That leaves us with seven Quikscript letters remaining. · and · are treated as variants of k and g—both to emphasise the voiced/unvoiced distinction and to save the X key for vowels. The Q and X keys may now be allocated to the two pairs of vowel letters that don’t fit anywhere else; · and · are typed unshifted since they are significantly more common in Quikscript text than · and ·, respectively. The last remaining letter, ·, is assigned to the Y key as that resembles the Greek upsilon (Υ) and is adjacent to U on the keyboard:

Finally, every good Quikscript or Shavian keyboard layout needs a method of typing the angled brackets   and/or namer dot ·. Here, I chose to have the angled brackets replace the regular round ones ( ) and to access the name dot via the grave accent/tilde (` ~) key.

Shavian edition

The Quikscript letters      have no equivalents in Shavian, but the latter does have an additional eight “compound letters” not present in Quikscript. The best available keyboard mappings (that make some kind of sense) would probably be to put ·𐑸 on the R key, for obvious reasons; ·𐑹 on W since it is next to Q (·𐑷); ·𐑳 on J since it is below U; and ·𐑿 on H since it is near both of its constituent letters, Y U (·𐑘 ·𐑵). I simply allocated the remaining five letters to spare shifted keys, in groups of two and three alongside each other:

I use the mnemonic 𐑓𐑺 ·𐑜𐑻𐑑𐑦 “fair Gertie” to remember ·𐑺 and ·𐑻; I haven’t thought of one for the others.