On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 09:49:01PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote: > No question there, but I think you have missed my point. The most crucial > step is simply to get people to realize that there is more than one symbol > involved and that the choice matters. So long as hitting the - key always > gets them hyphen, that's not going to happen. Having them grumble that > the stupid software keeps picking the wrong one would be an *IMPROVEMENT*.
When they're visibly very similar, do you think most users are going to use them right, no matter how accessible they are? Hyphen and dash are distinct (most people who use dashes also know that you need two hyphens to act as a dash, not one), but a single hyphen looks reasonable as a minus sign in most fonts. A real minus sign usually looks better, but I doubt most people will care enough to want to learn the difference between *four* different characters on their keyboard that generate a horizontal line--hyphen, dash, minus and underscore. If they won't do that, they won't even consider changing their typing habits. Would you add separate open double quote, close double quote, open single quote, close single quote, neutral single and double quotes, apostrophe and backtick keys, too? They're all useful, but that's one heck of a keyboard. :) -- Glenn Maynard -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
