Currently ULS uses following keyboard layout for Armenian
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keyboard_Layout_Armenian.png

The problem with this layout is that it is very, very unpopular (smaller percent of Armenian speakers know it, then let's say English speaker know Dvorak layout).

It was introduced by Microsoft in 2000, never got popular, and in Windows 8, it was deprecated and marked as legacy one.

Most popular, and de-facto standard layout is Armenian phonetic layout, which is significantly different from what we have in ULS at the moment.

As USL is going to be released in 3 days, and this will cause inconvenience/frustration for all users using Armenian.
That's why I put severity as Critical, and if we look through Armenian language perspective only, it is a Blocker.

We need to add following layouts

• Armenian Eastern Phonetic (should be default, de-facto standard, comes from DOS times, used by 95%)
• Armenian Western Phonetic (I'm not Western Armenian speaker, but guess it is used by Western Armenian speakers, in Armenian diasporas around the world)
• Armenian Typewriter (de-jure, official standard, but used by few percent only, as keyboard in Armenian don't have Armenian letters on them)

It would be nice to also include

• Armenian Eastern Phonetic layout (few letters swap there, to have more frequent letters, in more convenient places)

This one can be kept, guess it doesn't take much resources.

Now question is, how can I provide you with those layout configurations?

You can use, one from Linux xkb, but they dropped "en dash", for Armenian hyphen, which I believe is against Unicode standard.

You can take first 3 mentioned layouts, from Windows 8. Typewriter there is correct and can be used.

Phonetic there has 2 issues: "<" should be changed with "«", and ">" with "»". Quotes are very frequent in Armenian (any special name, of company, ship, product, etc.. should be quoted).

I can't comment for Western Phonetic in Windows 8.

Please don't use layouts from other places, as they usually don't follow Unicode standard.

Another question is: Can ULS use modifier-key, e.g. combination of Alt+Key, to insert different chars?
If so it will be very useful, as without it Armenian layout, can't include digits (no space left), and latin punctuation which is important in WikiSyntax (e.g. there's no []{}:<>!, etc).

Unless this is solved, I suggest we disable Armenian input method, not to create a confusion, as I wrote on Siebrand page.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Siebrand#Can_we_postpone_ULS_release_on_Armenian_wikiprojects.3F

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement