The notion of dytylography is used as a synonym for typing. Both terms refer to the technique that develops when using a typewriter’s keyboard.
It is possible to distinguish between handwriting and typing. In the first case, the person must stroke the characters manually, using a pencil, pen, or similar element. Machine typing, on the other hand, is done with a keyboard: the subject must press keys so that the characters appear on a paper or on a screen.
The dactylography, therefore, is linked to this second writing mechanism. Discipline was long associated with typewriters, although over the years the technique became applied to computers.
The original typewriters were mechanical: when the person pressed a key, a mechanism was activated that printed the character on the paper through the ink applied to it. Then the electrical machines emerged and later the computers, with which the characters appear on a screen by means of a digital system. The keyboard settings, in this framework, were not changed too much, so the dactylography maintained its essence.
The position of the hands, the location of the fingers on the keyboard and the body posture are some of the issues that the dactilography analyzes to favor an individual being able to write quickly and correctly without having to look at the keys.
One of the benefits that dactylography has given us since its inception is the possibility to write at a considerably higher speed than with the manual method, without affecting the clarity of the characters at all. This has always been very appropriate for corporate settings, where documents must be stored in files for future review, not always by the people who have created them.
It is important to note that there are currently a number of technologies used in combination with the basic notions of text entry into an electronic device, and that not all of them are directly related and could not replace this discipline altogether. For example, the mouse is a peripheral used on computers primarily to interact with objects such as icons, elements of a form (such as buttons, drop-down lists and slide bars) and windows; However, it is also possible to use them to type on a virtual keyboard.
While it is not normal to write long text using the mouse only, in certain contexts it can be very useful to increase security measures: when entering the control panel of a bank account, for example, it is common for a keyboard to appear on the screen to write our secret key, with the aim of combating automated control attempts by unauthorized users.
The dactilography is also complemented by speech recognition systems, which allow us to dictate words to the device so that it recognizes them and enters them wherever we want, whether it’s a text document or an address bar of a browser; in this case we are looking at a technology that can perfectly do without the use of hands for writing, and is in fact used by many people with health problems, such as being osteoarthritis.
The term typing, which is still possible to this day be used as a synonym for dactylography in certain areas, was actually obsolete after those changes that transformed this discipline and move it further and further away from mechanical devices; for this reason, it is currently preferred dactylography.