Intellark

Intellark is an Arabic keyboard layout for intuitive typing in Arabic made by the company Intellaren's . 48 Arabic letters shown in figure 1 can be produced with Intellark (note the addition of پ (p) and ڤ (v) for purposes of accurate transliteration/transcription). It is specifically designed for keyboard typists who type using Latin-based keyboard layouts similar to the one shown in figure 2, but wish to type in languages derived from the Arabic alphabet using their current typing knowledge and speed. Users with touch typing abilities in Latin-based keyboard layouts should find Intellark straight forward to learn typing in Arabic.[1]

Figure 2: QWERTY keyboard layout, named so after the arrangement of the top-left six keys that spell QWERTY.

The theory behind the Intellark keyboard map

Intellark was invented to address many of the problems inherent in current Arabic keyboard layouts from the perspective of the Latin-keyboard trained typist. Remembering that there are 48 Arabic characters to be mapped to 26-key keyboard layouts, the following are potential problems that usually arise.

Intellark is designed to maximize knowledge transfer from the following sources of knowledge or experiences:

Exploiting the user's knowledge on the above points therefore keeps the learning curve relatively flat for learning Intellark fairly quickly. Fig. 3 shows a table that shows the Intellark mapping scheme. In the figure, each row shows an adjacency list that connects an English letter to its most vocal-sound equivalent character from the Arabic character set, which in turn draws further relationships between each mapped-to Arabic character and a subset of Arabic characters that are similar in shape, phonetic sound or both, frequency respected.

Figure 3: Intellark full map from the English keyboard letters to Arabic characters.

Intellark mechanics

Unlike linear one-to-one keyboard layouts that typically map a single character to each key, Intellark is a one-to-many keyboard layout that maps one or more characters (Arabic letters and diacritics) to each key on a typical keyboard, where the second and beyond-second characters are produced as a function of key pressed and key timing. If the time difference between presses of the key is within tolerance (e.g., 300 milliseconds or less), the current character is replaced by another one that is a of lesser frequency but is logically and intuitively related to the main key character.

Examples

Relying on the Intellark map shown in Fig. 3, the following holds.

Imposing Intellark map on a QWERTY keyboard layout image

Figure 5 shows how Intellark may fit on a QWERTY keyboard layout. The rules for using this bulletin board image are as follows.

References

  1. "Intellark for typing in Arabic". The free Libya. 2011. Retrieved 26 March 2011.
  2. Madi, Mohsen (2011). "Intellark Online Tutorial". Intellaren Articles. Retrieved 24 March 2011. External link in |publisher= (help)

External links

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