Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote:
The idea here was that characters not on an ordinary QWERTY keyboard
could be entered _using_an_ordinary_QWERTY_keyboard._ Are there any
dead keys on an _ordinary_ (i.e. not one using an
international(ized) driver) QWERTY keyboard?
Not on the standard vanilla U.S. keyboard. It has to be provided by
the OS, via a driver, just as Compose key support has to be provided
by the OS.
Please distinguish between "keyboard" which is a piece of hardware and
"keyboard layout" which is a software input method.
Sorry for the shorthand. Everything I am talking about is software. I
don't think there is such a thing as a physical dead key on a computer
keyboard. The Compose key on *nix systems may be a physical key, but it
doesn't have any special ability to compose characters unless given that
ability by software.
"An ordinary QWERTY keyboard," as Jean-François put it, can generate any
character, Latin or Sinhala or whatever, so long as the hardware has the
right software behind it.
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA
http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell
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