2016-02-23 11:21 GMT+01:00 Marcel Schneider <[email protected]>: > I feel that people coming from―or studying languages of―countries and > communities on other continents should become able to type their language > in that script on any computer in France as well as in any other Latin > script using countries, given that the issue is only to add some more > characters of the same script. Latin script―as opposed to all other scripts > AFAIK―stays still chopped into “sub-scripts” and subsets. That brings but > counter-productive complications, while the implementation of the whole > script is technically feasible even on keyboard level. The only difference > between keyboard layouts of Latin script using countries should be varying > accessibility depending on frequencies of use. >
There will remain a resistance for the base layout of letters (basically QWERTY vs. AZERTY vs QWERTZ) and basic punctuation For all other characters (including shifted or non-shifted digits, because this is only an issue on mechanical keyboards, not touche-on-screen keyboard, and mechanical keyboards almost always have a numeric keypad anyway), people can adapt easily, provided that the less frequent but essential punctuation (parentheses, apostrophe, hyphen) can be found on the key labels, as well as the location of dead keys for all the essential diacritics. Indeed, if there's a new standard for French, there will be new physical keyboards placing the labels correctly for the essential punctuation, plus the essential letters combined with diacritics with a single keystroke : but the later letters are language-dependant and not script-dependant, so people writing in other languages for the same script may not find them useful, but should be able to locate the deadkeys to get the full coverage they need. If a standard is adopted, the set of essential letters combined with diacritics should be located on a small part of the keyboard that is the same across all languages of the script, but tuned specifically for a language (or a few languages of one country). There will remain keyboard layouts per country differing only on those locations in this small part, probably reduced to only 5 language-dependant keys (only designed for ease of access, e.g. "éèçàù" in French are very frequent and will be located in that part, but Italians would like to have all vowels with acute, Spanish will want to have the "ñ" in this part).
