David Starner wrote on 2002-11-05 21:49 UTC:
> As a Project Gutenberg volunteer, I've been submitting new texts in
> Unicode, even those in English, to preserve what the author wrote.
Very sensible indeed!
> Has anyone else made a 'more modern' English keyboard?
I too have my personal .Xmodmap file to get currently missing English
X11 keysyms such as
endash, emdash, nobreakspace, leftsinglequotemark, leftdoublequotemark,
rightsinglequotemark, rightdoublequotemark, degree, mu
accessible on a UK keyboard. But all these can only be considered to be
guru hacks.
What actually needs to be done is a revision of the relevant national
keyboard layout standard to map a Unicode repertoire appropriate for the
English language in question to labeled keys.
BS 4822:1994 Specification for keyboard allocation of graphic
characters for data processing
Once that is done, you could hopefully soon buy for £25 a new keyboard
and enjoy an adequate easy to enter character repertoire.
Labeled characters currently on the UK keyboard that I suggest to be
removed as they are not used in practice (EBCDIC legacy):
U00A6 BROKEN BAR
U00AC NOT SIGN
Characters that ought to be added:
U00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE
U00B5 MICRO SIGN
U00B0 DEGREE SIGN
U00B2 SUPERSCRIPT TWO
U00B3 SUPERSCRIPT THREE
U2013 EN DASH
U2014 EM DASH
U2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
U2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
U201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
U201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
U2020 DAGGER
U2021 DOUBLE DAGGER
and perhaps also a view combining characters for the most common
accents.
Are there any UK people here, preferably even employed by member
companies of the British Standards Institute, who would be interested in
setting up a little project to drag the (kicking and screaming) UK
keyboard standard into the 21st century? Ideally this would even be
coordinated with ANSI, in the hope that we might finally end up with a
single worldwide standard PC keyboard layout for all English-language
users ...
It's really about time to get this sorted out!
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/
