                                Shaw 3.0
                   A new layout for the Shaw Alphabet
                             by Tim Browne.

	Why bother with a new layout? Quite simply, because the more 
commonly available versions are too confusing and difficult to learn. The 
original version of the Shaw Alphabet was created many years ago on the 
Mac, and was simply the Androcles key card overlaid on top of the standard 
QWERTY keyboard. Version 2 is the one that we're all familiar with today, 
which from my perspective contains way too many layout problems. For 
example, why does "j" give the "yea" character and "J" give "judge"? Shaw's 
supposed to be representative of English, not Spanish. For that matter, why 
does "I" give "eat", "E" give "age", "F" give "ice", "A" give "ash", and 
"a" give "ado"? All of these problems, and many more (such as "M" being 
used for "ooze" instead of the more logical "U"), make the standard 
keyboard layout completely nonintuitive and far too cumbersome to learn, so 
I decided to make my own version, "Shaw 3.0".
	When creating this layout, I've gone right back to first principles 
and started from scratch. Most of the lower case letters have been left 
intact, except for a, j, q, x and y. Of the upper case letters, ALL of them 
were scrapped except for H, O, P, R, S, T and Z.
	For starters, I decided to make as many vowels as possible 
completely intuitive, so a, e, i, o and u match to "ash", "egg", "if", 
"on", and "up", while A, E, I, O and U match to "age", "each", "ice", 
"oak", and "ooze". j was given back to "judge" as it should be, and "yea" 
has been matched up to y. "Yew" was obviously the logical choice for Y, 
especially since y and u are side by side ("yu" rhymes with "you/yew"). 
"Sure" and "measure" stayed with S and Z, as did "Thigh" and "They" with T 
and H. Since "ah" and "awe" look like stylised Roman Q's, "ah" was given to 
q and "Awe" was given to Q. "Out" and "oil" were given to L and K, directly 
beneath O and I. "Wool" sounds and awful lot like a standalone w, so it 
became W. This simply left "ado", "Ian", and the "R" sounds.
	Since are sounds like the name of "r", it was given to R. "Air" and 
"err" were put at D and F, directly beneath E and R. Just below that, we 
have "Ian" and "ear" at C and V. I put "or" at G to keep as many of the 
R sounds together as possiblein the original version of this font. I 
eliminated this copy, since it was duplicated at P (almost an R, and right 
beside O). Since "ado" is now the most commonly used letter, it was placed 
on the home line at J, and "array" directly below it at M.
	I've taken the liberty of creating new characters, "fix" and "exact" 
to represent the "ks" and "gz" sounds, and placed them at x and X 
respectively. This fixes the only problem with the Shaw alphabet which can 
actually cause words to expand, eg. "fix" becoming "fiks", etc. I've also 
created another character, "whip", at G (right beside H).
	And what of the Namer Dot? I wasn't too thrilled with it being at /, 
especially since the font's being distributed via the InterNet (it wreaks 
havoc with the appearance of URLs). Since "and" is now represented by a 
single character in all circumstances anyway (n), the ampersand ("&") 
character is now completely superfluous, so I've tossed it in favour of the 
Namer Dot. In order to fill up the alphabet, I've also placed it at B for 
no other reason than its being the only free spot left.
	Finally, I've corrected a couple of gross, long standing errors of 
Kingsley Read's, ie. the "air/err" switch and the "ha-ha/hung" switch. 
These errors weren't noticed until after Androcles and the Lion had already 
gone to print, by which time it was "too late", which is, IMHO, a load of 
crap. All they had to do was print up another card saying "Sorry, but we 
made a mistake. These characters should be reversed in the text. Sorry for 
any inconvenience this has caused", and inserted it into the books. Time 
comsuming, yes, but not such a big deal, all things considered. At worst, 
they could have redone the book and come out with a second edition. In both 
these cases, it would have been fixed instead of being "frozen until the 
end of time". For those in the "Thou musteth keep Androcles's Shavianeth
completely intacteth with no changeseth of any kindeth" group, the 
character set listing now includes the swapped characters as x/y pairs. My 
remapping is x, Read's version is y. To make it as easy as possible to swap 
these characters on the fly while typing, each pair is side by side on the
QWERTY keyboard. I don't know about Dvorak or any others.

	To summarise, here's the complete Roman alphabet set with their 
updated Shavian mappings:

                         Shaw 3.0 Character Set

a ash                               A age
b bib                               B Namer Dot (also at &)
c church                            C Ian
d dead                              D air/ermine
e egg                               E eat
f fee                               F ermine/air
g gag                               G whip
h ha-ha/hung                        H they
i if                                I ice
j judge                             J ado
k kick                              K oil
l loll                              L out
m mime                              M array
n nun                               N hung/ha-ha
o on                                O oak
p peep                              P or
q ah                                Q awe
r roar                              R are
s so                                S sure
t tot                               T thigh
u up                                U ooze
v vow                               V ear
w woe                               W wool
x box                               X exact
y yea                               Y yew
z zoo                               Z measure

	Special note for Word users: After uploading the original version of 
this font, I discovered that the " and ' characters weren't coming up in 
Word. It would simply type the character and immediately delete it. To 
correct this, go to the "Tools" menu and select "Auto Correct" (if it's 
hidden, select the down arrows at the bottom of the menu), and then select 
"AutoFormat As You Type". Under the section heading "Replace As You Type", 
make sure that "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" is turned OFF, and then 
hit the OK box. Then select "AutoFormat" and do the same thing. Once this is 
done, the " and ' characters should work just fine.

	Although I tried to get this font to be the same size as Times New 
Roman, the program I used to create it (Softy) seems to be allergic to that 
size for some unknown reason. There's no "hinting" in Softy, so that probably 
has something to do with it. However, I did encounter a few sizes which seem 
to match up perfectly on screen:

Times New Roman    Shaw 3.0

      9.5            11.5
       12             14
     14.5             18
     15.5             19
     16.5             21
       17             21
     17.5             22

	I discovered these figures by creating a 2 column table, filling one 
side with a single character in Times New Roman (eg. a) and filling up the 
other side with Shaw 3.0 and played around with the font sizes until I got 
the same number of lines per page on each side. Other sizes can be 
discovered just as easily. All characters were designed by referring to the 
key card in Androcles and the Lion, and are as close as I could get to the 
original forms.
	This font is Copyright 2002 by me, but is free for personal use. If 
you wish to use it for any commercial purpose, including, but not limited 
to, any publication for which a charge is levied, in print or 
electronically, please contact me at rubik67@yahoo.com. Under NO 
circumstances is the font to be sold to anyone, or included on any 
electronic media (eg. floppy, CD, FTP site, etc) which is sold for any 
amount of money or charged for access in any way. Enjoy the font! :-)

                                                                  Tim Browne
                                                               August 23, 2002.