A few bugs in the Raspberry Pi distribution

• UK (Dvorak) has @ and " the wrong (American) way around.
• At least one extremely stupid app (!Director) tries to load the current language from the KEYBOARD LAYOUT (!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!! WTF? Is there no other way to do this is RISC OS?), and so fails with a “File name ‘SDFS::RISCOSpi.$.Apps.!Director.Resources.UK (Dvorak).Messages’ not recognised” error.

Who is Dvorak? Is seem to remember he is a composer but I thought there was a ‘j’ in the name and that he was not British?

Antonín Dvořák the composer was Czech and pronounced with a zh / j sound. The inventor of the keyboard layout, August Dvorak, was an American and pronounced the name using normal English rules.

I raised this with the guy who created the RISC OS keyboard layout for Dvorak UK to comment, this is what he said:

It was certainly intentional, but it is debatable.

Dredging up the memory, I think I can reconstruct the logic.

QWERTY is the popular one, and has lots of international variants, which we have to follow. Dvorak only seemed to have one de facto standard version, so we should try to stick with that as far as possible. I didn’t see any particular logic in aping QWERTY variants and trying to fork Dvorak unncessarily. And I suspect I didn’t want to confuse myself (or anyone else) excessively switching between Windows and RISC OS…

And why would one want a national UK variant of Dvorak at all? No UK Dvorak physical keyboard to be compatible with at the time, so unless one has a reason, don’t start making new stuff up. Now, the only real problem with Windows Dvorak, and hence our Dvorak USA, is the pound sign. On Dvorak USA, it has to go on Shift-Alt-3 which is a bit obscure (Alt-3 already being taken by superscript-3 since RISC OS 3.1), or it’s on the extra £/¤ key if you have it.

Don’t forget that pre-Risc PC, the UK layout was a PC USA keyboard, with an extra key to the left of backspace. And that key’s still supported in software – if you plug in a keyboard with that key (eg a standard Japanese or Korean one), the USA and Dvorak USA layouts will output £/¤ for it, despite it not being shown in the IntKey.Layouts Draw files I’ve found (they’re wrong – it should be shown, and I thought they did show them. They’re “logical layout”, not “physical layout”. Maybe someone removed it in error when adding the Windows keys). And I also extended the IntKey tables so that you could also use the key to the left of Enter on European keyboards for £/¤ instead.

Maybe I should have stuck with only that USA layout, and accepted using #/~ for £/¤ on a UK keyboard, but the awkwardness of £ access bugged me. And there’s no precedent for £ being on #/~ in the UK or on RISC OS. It’s a fudge. It should be on 3 or next to backspace. If we were on the Archimedes, with the real £/¤ key, I wouldn’t have created DvorakUK. But we’re using these UK PC keyboards now, so I wanted something that suited them. And there was no precedent for Dvorak on UK PC keyboards that I could find.

So, aside from unmarked Alt characters, our Dvorak UK only differs from the Windows Dvorak in that the # and ~ have moved to the extra key that UK has over USA, which makes room for £ and ¬. It’s a compromise between Windows Dvorak and Windows UK, avoiding something totally unprecedented: @ on “Q”. Every character is in a position it occupies in one of those two Windows layouts. To have put @ on Q would have seemed like just a bit like being different from the USA and/or Windows for the sake of it. [Aside : @ on Q isn’t totally unprecedented – it’s on Alt-Q on a few layouts. But I’d never seen @ there on Dvorak].

If there is now a de facto standard for @ being on “Q” on “Dvorak UK” that I’m unaware of, then we could certainly swap it. I still don’t think Dvorak UK exists on Windows. Maybe on Mac? I’ve never seen a real physical keyboard. I guess if you made one by shuffling your keycaps from a UK QWERTY one, it would be like that, which is a reasonable argument… I never did that though (Risc PC keyboards have a curved profile – doesn’t work well).

I know I had ISO 9995 in mind when working on keyboard stuff, but the current version doesn’t seem to have much to say on the subject (maybe the older one did, but it’s QWERTY-centric anyway). Dr Dvorak was American, and the only Dvorak standard I’m aware of is an ANSI (ie American) one. According to Wikipedia, that did deliberately reshuffle Dvorak’s original punctuation to keep shifted characters on the same letter as QWERTY (USA). Maybe because of keycap shuffling?

Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, Dvorak’s original designs had both " and @ on the top row… Which means Dvorak himself had no strong feelings about " being easily accessible, which at least makes double-quote on “2” potentially acceptable.

In summary – I don’t think it can really be called a bug unless there is now some serious weight behind @ being on Q on other implementations. But even then, RISC OS is allowed to be different from other OSes. The Archimedes UK layout was originally USA-based, with @ on 2, and Dvorak provides an excuse to partially revert, as there’s no longer the argument of cheap keyboards being available, aside from keycap shuffling.

I’d say leave it, unless people are really selling USB Dvorak UK keyboards in that layout. I didn’t find anyone after a bit of Googling. I only found 2 software implementations for other OSes – one puts / on “Q” instead (http://www.tarind.com/ukdvorak.html) and one has @ on “Q” (http://www.thespicers.net/uk-dvorak-keyboard-layout). But they’re both hobbyists making stuff up, and both post-date RISC OS’s Dvorak layout.

Perhaps there’s a huge RISC OS Dvorak user base I’m unaware of, and maybe the placement of " and @ have always bugged them. :) How many people really do shuffle keycaps? No idea – never met another Dvorak user :) They could still do it – just need to buy both a UK and USA PC keyboard and combine the caps for RISC OS…

On the country/language thing. Yes, I remember I had to fudge the resource directories of a couple of apps. There’s no proper “language” indication in RISC OS. “Country” really just means “Alphabet+Keyboard”, but that’s all you had in RISC OS 2 (and on the BBC), so it’s what some apps use. A RISC OS 3 app should look at Territory, rather than Country. And it should obviously default to UK if not present.

Linux has UK Dvorak that has @ and " on ’ and 2 respectively. Of course, it depends on when this was done, it could have been done before UK Dvorak was a thing in Linux (though when THIS was done I have no clue).

Having " and @ the correct way around for a physical UK keyboard is useful for when people are learning Dvorak, because they can rearrange the key caps. It’s how I learnt Dvorak, and now anything that uses the US layout jars me (I have to use a custom program on Windows to get proper UK Dvorak, but it’s very good, called Portable Keyboard Layout). Otherwise, it’s different from everything else that has UK Dvorak (ie Linux). It’s Window’s fault for not having a proper UK Dvorak (I never did like that OS).