RE: Deseret keyboard (was:Re: Special Type Sorts Tray 2001)

[Peter_Constable]

Carl:

>I was  the chairman of the keyboard standards committee for ACCESS.bus which
>was the  predecessor the USB....

>Had they done a better job you could really use  the
>field in the device driver and be able to use two keyboards with different  
>keyboard language layout codes. 

I wasn't thinking of someone using multiple hardware keyboards. Would anyone want to switch from one language to another by shuffling physical keyboards on their desktop? I don't know.


> However Intel got impatient and developed the
>USB  standard.  Unfortunately they only reserved 8 bits for the keyboard  
>language identifier. 

Now, this interests me in relation to a completely different topic. The USB standard supports language IDs? Where can I find out more about that?


>I am not clever enough to figure out how  to
>encode 6700 language in 8 bits.

Certainly not at once!


>It is even worse because you can have  
>different language layouts.  For example there are several very different  
>French keyboard layouts. 

I convinced myself recently that specifying keyboard layouts needs to be done in terms of identifier pairs: one ID to specify a language/writing-system-encoding (e.g. Azerbaijani in Cyrillic Unicode vs. Azerbaijani in Roman Unicode) together with a particular keyboard layout (where a given layout determines a mapping from keystroke sequences to codepoints, and might possibly be used for more than one writing system).



- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
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