• You are not logged in.

    Optimizing Colemak for Bulgarian cyrillic

    • Started by stassev
    • 5 Replies:
    • Reputation: 0
    • Registered: 18-Oct-2014
    • Posts: 3

    Hello,

    It's been a year now that I've been working on an optimized cyrillic Colemak-based layout. So, I wanted to share my results with you.

    Here is how I approached the problem of fitting all 30 bg letters on a standard us keyboard. First, I generated several layouts trying to optimize each of them:
    1) based on letter frequency (in Bulgarian; not Russian, English, or another language)
    2) by minimizing the amount of disruption to the base Colemak layout
    3) using several training text (fiction, non-fiction, wikipedia and newspaper articles) in Bulgarian to do a more detailed analysis using the website: http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/#/main  (The analysis was a bit of a pain as the website does not accept user-based layouts, so I had to map cyrillic letters in my test layouts to latin letters on existing layouts, and so on, and so on ...)
    4) using common sense

    I ended up with several more or less equivalent layouts according to the subjective and objective measures above. I tested them for a month or so, and ended up with the following "best" layout, which I have been using for almost a year now (touch typing of course) without any wrist injuries! ;)

    I hope you find it useful!

    bg phonetic Colemak-based layout

    Offline
    • 0
    • Reputation: 0
    • Registered: 18-Oct-2014
    • Posts: 3

    I personally find the BDS layout terrible as it splits the 4 most frequently used Bulgarian letters (а е и о) in two rows to be typed by just two fingers of the left hand. I really liked the home row idea behind Colemak and tried to apply it to my version of the bg layout even if that implied not exactly following the phonetized colemak (that's why "в" is in place of h).

    But I'm sure there are people out there that for one reason or another do not like putting the most frequently used letters on the home row ...

    Offline
    • 0
    • Reputation: 0
    • Registered: 05-Jan-2015
    • Posts: 1

    letters (а е и о) in two rows to be typed by just two fingers of the left hand. I really liked the home row idea behind Colemak and tried to apply it to my version of the bg layout even if that implied not exactly following the phonetized colemak (that's why "в" is in place of h).
    But I'm sure there are people out there that for one reason or another do not like putting the most frequently used letters on the home row
    ____________________________________________________
    http://www.tesking.biz/

    Offline
    • 0
    • Reputation: 210
    • From: Viken, Norway
    • Registered: 13-Dec-2006
    • Posts: 5,343

    If you type mostly Bulgarian, it's probably better than Rulemak – but if you type also in English maybe Rulemak for Bulgarian is good? For a Colemak typist it obviously has the advantage of familiarity at least!

    https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php … 016#p10016
    https://forum.colemak.com/viewtopic.php … 877#p13877

        Cmk-X-phon-bg.png

    Last edited by DreymaR (05-Jan-2015 16:49:25)

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

    Offline
    • 0
    • Reputation: 0
    • Registered: 18-Oct-2014
    • Posts: 3

    I tried the Rulemak for Bulgarian before experimenting with modifying the bg layout, but some of the rarely typed letters (such as х and ф) were in locations which were much more suitable for more frequently typed letters. So, that's why I ended up modifying the layout.

    ... and yes, I do type a lot in English (in standard colemak) as well ...

    Offline
    • 0
    • Reputation: 210
    • From: Viken, Norway
    • Registered: 13-Dec-2006
    • Posts: 5,343

    Well, in these DH-mod days the middle trench position isn't considered so good after all but that may be an odd comment...

    If you had to change as little as possible from Rulemak, what would it be?

    *** Learn Colemak in 2–5 steps with Tarmak! ***
    *** Check out my Big Bag of Keyboard Tricks for Win/Linux/TMK... ***

    Offline
    • 0