Keld wrote on 2002-02-21 16:36 UTC: > I can type � and � directly from the keyboard with my standard > X danish keyboard
I'm glad to hear that you are one of the ~12 people in Europe who know how to enter � under XFree86 directly from the keyboard. [Even though the GB keyboard has an extra key location for �, it normally leads to the entry of |, because that is what 99.9997% of all people pressing this key actually wanted to enter (for shell pipe, C or, etc.)]. Perhaps you are even one of the <5 people in Europe who know what this character is good for and why it was needed in addition to |? (The standard excuse "EBDIC compatibility" does not count here ... ;-) If we update the keyboard mappings, please do not give any special priority to ISO 8859-1 characters. There are far more important characters in UCS then full ISO 8859-1 coverage. In particular, very urgently missing on English keyboards is the EN DASH. I am fed up with seeing hyphen signs being used everywhere as dashes. It hurts my typographic eye and this abuse proves every day again that the historic keyboard layouts that were developped originally for monospaced ASCII/Latin-1 typewriters are utterly inadequate for contemporary word processing needs, with the massive abuse of the hyphen as a dash and minus (for which there are no officially designated keys) is the most significant worry. Something has to be done by the keyboard standards community urgently. The application and printing community has fixed the problem long ago with the use of CP1252 and UCS, but users still have no clue about how to enter a dash or minus sign on their keyboard, and even under platforms such as Win32, each application has it's own conventions. Most national variants of ISO 9995 cover today only the repertoire of MES-1 (ISO 6937 plus the EURO SIGN), which lack EN SPACE EM SPACE MINUS and other essential typographic characters. Nobody uses ISO 6937 and western keyboards really should cover the CP1252 subset of UCS properly, because that is what word processing files are encoded in today, and that reflects actual needs. How do we fix this in the keyboard standards and how do we get the fix onto the market? Any suggestions? Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
