File talk:Keyboard argentina.jpg

I just noticed (actually looked) at this image and was surprised to find english wording (erase, enter, pg up/down, etc). I'm assuming that they'll be translated, right?

yes

great! :)

BTW, I always wondered why the opening question and exclamation marks aren't in their 'natural' sequence: opening on the left, closing on the right...

I'll leave this for a native speaker to sort out.

Which I am... unfortunately I'm no HCI expert to say which is better, but from an intuitive uneducated guess, it would be more natural to have ¿?/¡! sequence rather than ?¿/!¡

Also, having personally dealt with several flavors of keyboards, one thing that really annoys me is that programming uses symbols that are not necessarily available (or easily typed) in keyboards for foreign languages. --Xavi 10:36, 3 December 2006 (EST)

Are there particular characters you have in mind? --Walter 11:18, 3 December 2006 (EST)

As far as I can tell, the 'programming' keys []|~^:. are readily available... I come from the land of square brackets (aka Smalltalk) and my experience with AZERTY/French keyboards was disastrous. Also the ES/LA keyboards sometimes lacked the '\' (which was a nightmare when dealing with DOS).--Xavi 13:25, 3 December 2006 (EST)

Why do you use a QWERTY distribution? Why not DVORAK? ---And retrain everybody when they go to QWERTY keyboards?, Silly:--Dagoflores 21:36, 7 December 2006 (EST)

Although I'm not the original poster, nor a Dvorak layout fan, when I first heard about them (early 80's maybe) I thought them as really cool (a funcional layout) and wondered why nobody used them. Decades later and after nearly losing my untrained pinky to the A key on Azerty keyboards, I always configure my layout to US-Intl and type blindly. I would think that kids starting with Dvorak layouts (iow, as the 'natural' layout), they can configure whichever keyboard to their liking and no harm will be done... but then again, Dvorak layouts would need to be calibrated for each language, lefty/righty layout, etc. I think this could be a great opportunity to nail the coffin of hereditary dysfuntional layouts... then again, some things refuse to die easily... maybe in a future version the keyboards will be fully programmable with tiny E-ink displays on each key visually matching the physical and logical layouts and each kid could program them at will... crazy? who knows :) --Xavi 21:52, 8 December 2006 (EST)

After a new comment about Argentina using Qwerty keyboards... which isn't really true, since a variation is used which includes the required {ñÑ} and the ability to compose {áéíóúü} using {´¨}, the 'optional' opening {¿¡} (required but usually not used) and the totally pointless {çǪº¬} (anybody knows what ¬ is used for??). Anyway, I'm not advocating to go Dvorak's way, but I found a source where at least some studies of frequencies have been done: Shiar.org and for other international layouts DVZine.org. Based on real studies, I wouldn't mind having a Dvorak keyboard in spanish.

One final comment not necessarily related to argentina's or spanish keyboards, is that accents should be composed, not hardwired. For example, Azerty keyboards are (for me) a perfect example of everything a keyboard should NOT be: numbers are shifted, keyboard-wise the french seem to be always screaming instead of whispering (given that the exclamation mark is unshifted, while the period is shifted), lots of accented characters are directly available instead of composed (wasting a lot of key-space), etc. So when OLPC lands in french speaking countries I would seriously take a look into french dvorak layouts. Other languages, I'm ignorant about... --Xavi 08:05, 12 December 2006 (EST)