Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

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aravinda
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Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby aravinda » Tue Jul 18, 2017 10:05 am

At the moment, I am using a Cyrillic keyboard cover for my MacBook (though I don't type much Cyrillic).
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AV ... UTF8&psc=1
I find it easier to use than a Cyrillic keyboard viewer. I am now used to type English without removing the keyboard cover but if I want, I can easily remove it (unlike stickers). As a bonus, it also prevents dust getting into the keyboard. I have been looking for a similar product for Nāgarī script (to type Sanskrit, Hindi etc) for sometime without success. (They have similar products for few other scripts/languages but not for Nāgarī). Has anyone come across/used a similar product for typing Nāgarī?

Note: I have no financial interest in their products.
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby blaurebell » Tue Jul 18, 2017 10:56 am

I don't know whether there is a product like that, but I actually always touch type because it's faster anyway. I've been touch typing with the German keyboard layout for most of my life, and when I could only get my hands on an English keyboard, I still continued to use the German keyboard layout. When I look at the keyboard I do get confused, but I simply don't look now. So, the first thing I did when starting to learn Russian was actually to learn to touch type in Russian (https://www.keybr.com/). It only took a little while and it was probably the most useful skill I picked up for Russian, because it saves an awful lot of time with dictionary lookups. Maybe a similar effort would help you with your problem too? Not sure whether it's the right keyboard layout, but there is this:
http://indiatyping.com/index.php/typing ... ping-tutor
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Jul 18, 2017 11:27 am

Haven't seen Nāgarī covers - I use kbcovers for some languages and these are good (if I can remember where I put it). For languages where a cover is not available I use stickers.

You could order 50+ covers over at alibaba and start a business.... :D
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby aravinda » Tue Jul 18, 2017 11:55 am

blaurebell wrote:I don't know whether there is a product like that, but I actually always touch type because it's faster anyway. I've been touch typing with the German keyboard layout for most of my life, and when I could only get my hands on an English keyboard, I still continued to use the German keyboard layout. When I look at the keyboard I do get confused, but I simply don't look now. So, the first thing I did when starting to learn Russian was actually to learn to touch type in Russian (https://www.keybr.com/). It only took a little while and it was probably the most useful skill I picked up for Russian, because it saves an awful lot of time with dictionary lookups. Maybe a similar effort would help you with your problem too? Not sure whether it's the right keyboard layout, but there is this:
http://indiatyping.com/index.php/typing ... ping-tutor

Thank you for the links (especially for the typing practice link). I remember you mention touch typing in an earlier post (may be in your log). Yes, that makes sense. The truth is I can hardly touch type even in English! :oops: My typing style is more like "where is A?, where is B? & so on". :lol: To be honest I have never tried to learn it. Maybe I should try. Hindi layout doesn't match the current Devanāgarī input layout on my Mac (but there are other available layouts I haven't checked).
zenmonkey wrote:Haven't seen Nāgarī covers - I use kbcovers for some languages and these are good (if I can remember where I put it). For languages where a cover is not available I use stickers.

You could order 50+ covers over at alibaba and start a business.... :D

Will check it out but 50+ is slightly above the number of languages I plan to master :lol:
Edited once.
Last edited by aravinda on Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby blaurebell » Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:00 pm

aravinda wrote:My typing style is more like "where is A?, where is B? & so on". To be honest I have never tried to learn it.


It's really quite easy to learn and it saves so much time! The website I linked has English keyboard layouts too and it definitely worked well for the standard Russian keyboard layout. There also seems to be software that turns english inputs into hindi characters, then you could just use some standard English layout.
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:10 pm

aravinda wrote:
blaurebell wrote:I don't know whether there is a product like that, but I actually always touch type because it's faster anyway. I've been touch typing with the German keyboard layout for most of my life, and when I could only get my hands on an English keyboard, I still continued to use the German keyboard layout. When I look at the keyboard I do get confused, but I simply don't look now. So, the first thing I did when starting to learn Russian was actually to learn to touch type in Russian (https://www.keybr.com/). It only took a little while and it was probably the most useful skill I picked up for Russian, because it saves an awful lot of time with dictionary lookups. Maybe a similar effort would help you with your problem too? Not sure whether it's the right keyboard layout, but there is this:
http://indiatyping.com/index.php/typing ... ping-tutor

Thank you for the links (especially for the typing practice link). I remember you mention touch typing in an earlier post (may be in your log). Yes, that makes sense. The truth is I can hardly touch type even in English! :oops: My typing style is more like "where is A?, where is B? & so on". :lol: To be honest I have never tried to learn it. Maybe I should try. Hindi layout doesn't match the current Devanāgarī input layout on my Mac (but there are other available layouts I haven't checked).
zenmonkey wrote:Haven't seen Nāgarī covers - I use kbcovers for some languages and these are good (if I can remember where I put it). For languages where a cover is not available I use stickers.

You could order 50+ covers over at alibaba and start a business.... :D

Will check it out but 50+ is slightly above the number of languages I plan to master :lol:
Edited once.


Oh, no. It isn't 50 different covers - you end up having to design and order 50 covers of the same design... :lol: For friends...
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby aravinda » Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:23 pm

blaurebell wrote:
aravinda wrote:My typing style is more like "where is A?, where is B? & so on". To be honest I have never tried to learn it.


It's really quite easy to learn and it saves so much time! The website I linked has English keyboard layouts too and it definitely worked well for the standard Russian keyboard layout. There also seems to be software that turns english inputs into hindi characters, then you could just use some standard English layout.


At first I didn't realize that the site you linked had other keyboard layouts. Currently I use couple of options to type Sankrit and related languages (including my native language, Sinhala):
1. Keyboard viewer on the Mac
2. Google Input Tools
3. Online tools that convert transliteration to the native script
There's is another option (other than learning touch typing): having a separate keyboard. Unfortunately, I haven't found Mac compatible keyboards for Sanskrit or Sinhala

Edited for typos.
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby mcthulhu » Tue Jul 18, 2017 1:11 pm

Blaurebell, thanks from me as well for the typing practice link; I wasn't familiar with that site. I can touch type in a couple of languages but for Russian I'm mostly still hunt-and-peck.
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby aokoye » Tue Jul 18, 2017 4:49 pm

Another option would be to get a generic keyboard cover and put stickers on it. Not elegant but it solves your general issue with stickers being hard to remove.
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Re: Nāgarī Keyboard Cover

Postby brilliantyears » Thu Aug 03, 2017 8:55 am

blaurebell wrote:So, the first thing I did when starting to learn Russian was actually to learn to touch type in Russian (https://www.keybr.com/).

This is awesome, thank you for sharing! It never occurred to me to look for something like this. Definitely going to search for a Korean one too.
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