The users have been offered cheap prices of non-Ethiopic characters that come apart with commands as simple as formatting. Some have been modifying our keyboards only because gullible consumers do not know better or care less.
They are methods to fit the Ethiopic to the contemporary technology. These methods reduce the functions of computers to those of typewriters in that only incomplete fonts can be used. On the other hand, the other typewriter methods are disabling methods. It is an enabling constructive technology which gave us the power to type Ethiopic for the first time. We established a standard layout so that Ethiopic can be accessed and typed by many programs. The computerization of Ethiopic involves the systematic substitution and mobilization of thousands of characters. Our hard work and persistence has enabled us to receive a US pending patent. Ethiopic can also be sent via electronic mail over the Internet as document or as attachment. Ethiopic documents can be exported or imported to and from many programs and mixed with other language characters. WordPerfect is slightly behind in moving the Ethiopic templates and typefaces. In spite of these, there are still a few problems with even Microsoft Word which happens to be the best of all the current programs for Ethiopic typing. Another solution was EthioScaler which moves characters around. These problems were avoided by excluding the maps assigned to the extended characters in both ModEth (Ethiopian word processor for DOS released in 1988) and EthioWin (Ethiopic for Windows). This problem has continued even after IBM has increased the character set from 128 to 256 in 1983. Automation of languages has continued to be a problem due to incompatibility of character maps. Complications still exist since the exact map of each of the 480 Ethiopic characters has not been settled. The emphasis was on convenience rather than show the relationship between the Ethiopic and Latin characters. The Ethiopic keyboard is the latest of the preliminary version. Ethio-phonetics is an efficient use of the keyboard since it expands it for use with hundreds of the Ethiopic characters and functions. The two keystrokes involve the striking of any two of the character keys or double striking the same key. Ethio-phonetics is a new method of typing the individual phonetic character with a maximum of two keystrokes. Since then the expansion of the keyboard by using two keystrokes per character has improved Ethio-phonetics. The use of the computer keyboard for Ethiopic typing has been discussed in Ethiopian Review (April, 1991). In Latin, to replicate the same sound, a consonant has to be followed by a vowel. It has retained the representation of sounds by characters. G]z (Geèz) or Ethiopic is one of the ancient alphabets. SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY The Ethiopic Computer Keyboard