Switching
Coming from PowerGeez: what changes, and what does not
If you have typed Amharic for twenty years, you do not type letters any more — your hands do. That is worth protecting, and it is the first thing any replacement has to answer for. This page is the specific account: what was typed into both keyboards, and what came out.
ልምድ
Your keystrokes are the ones Ezra was built from
Ezra does not approximate PowerGeez from the outside. Its layout is generated from a keyboard written to preserve PowerGeez sequences, and the sequences were then typed into PowerGeez itself, on a machine with the product installed, to check that the description was true.
The order markers are the whole scheme, so they were the first thing typed. A consonant on its own gives the first order; the vowel that follows chooses the rest. Here is what PowerGeez committed, key by key:
Ezra commits the same seven characters for the same seven keys. If those are the keys in your hands, they stay the keys in your hands.
What Ezra reaches that PowerGeez does not
The vendor’s own character tables were read out of a PowerGeez installation and joined against Ezra’s. Of the 316 Ethiopic characters PowerGeez can produce, none are out of Ezra’s reach. Ezra reaches 65 that PowerGeez cannot — including two forms missing from the vendor’s own table through what looks like a defect in one row of it.
Nothing you can currently type becomes untypeable. That is the direction a migration has to run in.
The two places they differ
Two sittings at the vendor’s product turned up two differences. Both are places where the openly licensed keyboard Ezra descends from describes PowerGeez slightly differently from how PowerGeez behaves, and Ezra inherited the description.
The labialisation marker
Type kWa
A lowercase w behaves the same in both: kwa gives ከዋ either way. The capital is where they part — PowerGeez reads W as the consonant ወ, so it gives two characters, and Ezra reads it as a labialisation marker and gives the single character. Ezra reaches a letter here that the vendor's phonetic keyboard was not observed to reach.
The alternate-form suffix
Type s[
PowerGeez treats the bracket as an ordinary punctuation key and emits a guillemet after the letter. Ezra reads it as a suffix that selects the other member of the homophone family.
Your existing documents
Switching keyboard does nothing to the files you already have, and it does not need to. Documents typed in PowerGeez, VisualGeez and the rest hold Latin letters that an old font drew Amharic over — a separate problem, with a separate answer.
What to expect on the first run
- Ezra is a Windows input method, not a word processor and not a font. You switch to it the way you switch to any other keyboard Windows has installed, and it types into whatever application is in front of you.
- Nothing has to be uninstalled first. An input method sits alongside the ones already on the machine rather than replacing them, so the old software stays where it is while you decide.
- The output is Unicode from the first keystroke. Anything typed in Ezra is ordinary Amharic text that reads correctly on a phone, in a browser and on a machine that has never had an Ethiopic font installed.
Why this page names other software
PowerGeez and the programs alongside it did the work that made Amharic typing possible on a computer at all, years before Unicode had an answer. Offices are fast in them because they were good enough to build a habit on.
Naming them here is not a comparison of merit. It is the only way to give a typist the one thing they actually need before switching: which keys will behave differently under their fingers. Withholding that to avoid mentioning a competitor would be a worse kind of dishonesty than naming one.