Alan Coopersmith wrote on 2004-08-04 15:00 UTC:
> > What I am trying to do is to emulate the
> > MS-Windows behaviour which lets one enter arbitrary characters by using
> > the Alt-Key while entering the character code on the numerical keypad.
The MS-Windows behaviour is somewhat cumbersome for several reasons:
- It uses decimal numbers, whereas many people seem to be far more
familiar with hexadecimal numbers of well-known non-ASCII Unicode
characters (20AC is the EURO, 2018/2018 are the left/right single
quotation mark, 2013/2014 are en/em dash, 2212 is the minus sign, etc.),
probably because the Unicode standard prints only the hex codes.
- It requires two hands to be used simultaneously.
- It requires the entry of a redundant leading zero, to avoid
the MS-DOS CP437 backwards compatibility mode.
There is a much neater alternative standardized in
ISO/IEC 14755 - Input methods to enter characters from
the repertoire of ISO/IEC 10646 with a keyboard or other input devices
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ISO-14755.pdf
which fixes all these problems.
If you do something in this area, please implement the ISO 14755 hex
input method, and not the old MS-Windows one. (Or implement both
together, if you really need MS-Windows compatibility here. They don't
interfere with each other, because the ISO 14755 technique uses
Ctrl-Shift to activate the hex-entry mode, while MS-Windows uses Alt.)
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
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