Typing Maltese characters

Abstract

Those pioneers who invented our Maltese orthography never knew what a Pandora's box they had created. Those of us who spend a considerable part of our time on a computer keyboard know from hard experience the difficulties encountered in writing Maltese. Typing Maltese can easily take twice as long as typing the same message in English. The reason is the lack of user-friendliness of keyboard and software. Even with the recent facilities provided with the popular fonts such as Times New Roman or Aria!, one often has to press three keys at a time to produce letters like C,G H,or Z. The alternative seems to be the use of dedicated keys which lie at awkward positions on the keyboard, necessitating visual control, with consequent loss of time and efficiency.