Ted writes:

> Wirt, for the sake of science, is it possible to get a foreign language
>  touch-typist (mit keyboard, of course) and do a few timings versus yourself
>  with your plan (Hey, it should be at least as valid as the Dvorak keyboard
>  tests run by the good doctor himself :-)?
>
> You could get Ferenc to submit a good text and a how fast he (or the closest
> typing expert) can type it and then give it a run or two yourself.  As the
F11
> method is intended as an only-if-you-don't-have-the-correct-keyboard method,
> if you can put it out at 80% the speed I'd say you've more than established
> it's viability.

I would be pleased to do that.

(As an off-to-the-side note, as far as touch typing goes, it's important to
remember that you're not typing in the blind, with your eyes shut. You're
watching the screen; you're just not having to watch every keystroke that
your fingers are using to strike the keys.)

I would be pleased to participate in Ted's experiment with text from any
European language, so if you have some text that you have timings on, please
e-mail it to me and I'll have several people sit around and time my attempts
at typing it. One note though, Windows-extended ISO Latin-1 is biased towards
the western European nations. Hungarian has two characters in its alphabet
that aren't in ISO Latin-1 character set: the I and the L with a small,
diagonal slash running through them. With that caveat in mind, I would be
pleased to do what I can and report the results as accurately as possible for
any Latin-based language.

Wirt