On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 05:34:29PM +0000, Markus Kuhn wrote: > 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.)].
Well, I designed how to get there so I should know. You are probably right that very few know. But it is on top of the | character so it would be easy to guess. > 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 ... ;-) I dont know either :-) > 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. probably, but when I did that the 8859 charceters were the one that was useful. > 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. so where should it go? alt-minus? > > 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? It is really hard to get something done. What we can do is something with X. Getting the physical layout is much harder. Unless you want to split the keyboard and take off the keys and rearrange them. Could be done. Costs some money. But you can do it in a small scale and then try to pull it off in the big. But try to think of DVORAC keyboards, they never took off. I have tried to persuade Cherry to introduce some plug-and-play indification so the keyborad could identify itself when asked, but without luck yet. Everything else nowadays identifies itself on a system. we can make em space happen in X, and en space. And minus. With current keyboards. As I almost exclusively run linux that would make me happy. Keld -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
