LadinoType Keyboard Mapping
Fluent Typing
LadinoType is designed to allow you to naturally type in Ladino using the Latin alphabet following the Aki Yerushalayim orthography standards. To enable this process, LadinoType uses a special keyboard mapping. You should be sure to only use lowercase letters except in certain situations noted below. LadinoType will then process the text using hundreds of algorithms to render the proper output in Solitreo, Rashi and Meruba scripts. Among some of the things that LadinoType does for you automatically are:
- Adds in alephs when necesary to begin a word or split vowels
- Uses the "sofit" form of a Hebrew letter, where applicable, at the end of a word
- Adds in a "rafe" where necessary to make the secondary sounds of a Hebrew letter
- Where two Hebrew letters make the same sound, it uses the one used in Aki Yerushalayim orthography standards
Special Circumstances
There may be situations in which you want to manually override the standard Ladino orthography or spell out a name or word of Hebrew or other non-Ladino origin. You can accomplish this by using placing a word in square brackets [ ] and, when needed, using uppercase letters. A word in square brackets bypasses the LadinoType orthography algorithms and instead is transliterated letter for letter. For example, to type the Hebrew greeting "Shalom" in LadinoType one would type "[SloM]" to get שָׁלוֹם ( shift + s for "shin," lowercase l for "lamed," o for "vav" and shift + m for "mem sofit"). See the Using Uppercase Characters for more information.
Keyboard Mapping
To handle special circumstances such as those described above, you can use specific keys. The LadinoType keyboard layout is set up to be intuitive and follows certain straightforward rules:
- A Hebrew letter is mapped to the latin letter making that sound. For example, lowercase l is mapped to lamed.
- Where more than one Hebrew letter corresponds to a latin letter, the Hebrew letter used in Ladino is mapped to the lowercase key and the other Hebrew letter is mapped to the uppercase key. For example, s is mapped to samech and shift + s is mapped to shin.
- Where a Hebrew letter takes a regular form and a sofit form, the regular form is mapped to the lowercase key and the sofit form is mapped to the uppercase key. For example, m is mapped to mem and shift + m is mapped to mem sofit.
- Where a Hebrew letter takes a form with a rafe and a form without rafe, the form without the rafe is mapped to the lowercase key and the form with rafe is mapped to the uppercase key. For example, z is mapped to zayin and shift + z is mapped to zayin with rafe.
- Yod is mapped to e, shift + e, i and shift + i
- Vav is mapped to o, shift + o, u and shift + u
Keyboard Chart
This is the LadinoType keyboard layout:
