Marcel Schneider <charupdate at orange dot fr> wrote: > I don't measure exactly the implications of a keyboard compliance to > a given standard when this standard is developed "on the paper" and > without taking into consideration all needs and preferences of end- > users.
ISO did not come up with the 2010 revision to 9995-3 on their own. It originated with the German NB. > The Ohm sign you mention reminds me that ISO perpetuated on > keyboard some deprecated legacy characters that end up anyway to be > replaced with their canonical equivalent, that in this example is > Greek capital omega. That's another disconnect. The relationship between U+2126 OHM SIGN and U+03A9 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA is not at issue here. Neither of these characters is present on US International. > And standardizing the dead key registries to exclude all characters > that are not composed ones, is a counterproductive constraint based on > the belief that the only way to get aware of the content of a layout > is to read the keycap labels. This is a way of never getting curly > quotes and apostrophe. Dead keys under Windows are not constrained in the way you describe. As I said earlier today, I use a keyboard on Windows on which all of these characters are available via dead keys: “ ” ‘ ’ ʼ > I'm very glad to learn there is this good keyboard layout for the USA > and for the UK, and I wonder very much what's missing for everybody to > use it. > Thank you very much, I just downloaded the two drivers and I'm curious > about how to map nine hundred characters on two levels without > chaining dead keys! > Well I didn't look for, because at the beginning I searched for the > French keyboard. Since John made the .klc source file available with the download, I'm sure it would not be too difficult to adapt it to a French-based layout. > The problem is not about code pages, it is about keeping them vividly > in users' minds and letting them impact the Unicode Standard while > since a quarter of a century, Unicode is on. I'd guess there are very few users who consciously see the use of U+2019 as both apostrophe and right-single-quote as a vestige of code pages, or as a conscious effort by Evil Microsoft™ to force them into anything. > There's so much communication about word processing, that there would > have been a little place to introduce the difference between an > apostrophe and a single closing quotation mark, but instead of that, > Microsoft urged Unicode to remove the recommendation and to restore > the chaos. Perhaps a UTC member can confirm whether this is fact or speculation. Markus Kuhn's comment from 1999 about "couldn't Unicode follow Microsoft...?" doesn't prove that Unicode was in fact strong-armed by Microsoft. -- Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸
