Method and apparatus for text entry of tone marks

Abstract

A method and apparatus for entering text including tone marks and integral diacritics, such as Vietnamese, uses a compact keypad (110). The compact keypad has letters in alphabetical sequence, including letters with integral diacritics (142, 143, 146, 148) in the same order as they arrive in the Vietnamese alphabet series. The five tone marks (154,155,157,158,159) are positioned on five separate keys (124, 125, 127, 128, 129) of the compact keypad (110). The apparatus has an associated method (300) where a processor determines if a previous keypress represents a neutral vowel (350) and modifies the neutral vowel with a tone mark 360 if a current keypress has an associated tone mark.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.