On Tue, 11 Oct 2016 15:52:20 +0000, Don Osborn wrote: […] > > The problem is input systems, not availability of fonts as it once was. > Keyboard > layouts exist for Ga and other Ghanaian languages, and these enable typing > needed > extended Latin characters. But a number of them, including possibly all for > mobile > devices, work by substituting selected key assignments, which in the case of > multilingual text would apparently mean switching keyboards to accommodate > characters not present in both/all languages used. Not ideal. > […]
AIUI, what is drawing people away from getting able to efficiently input Extended Latin alongside with Basic Latin, is the fear of becoming unable to efficiently input digits as soon as these donʼt show up in the Base shift state any longer. Thus IMHO it could be interesting for many more of the worldʼs languages to see that there is a good reason to depart from the typical layout pattern that has the digits in the Base shift state, and to see that this is in practice feasible inside the system input framework, which doesnʼt have so much of the severe limitations that are often pointed. These mainly result from the appearance that the Windows keyboarding framework is given in the MSKLC UI, while the author of this useful software himself invited his users to expand the features by using the included Keyboard Table Generation Tool (Unicode) 3.40. So do I, FWIW. While still being very busy with the French keyboard layouts that Iʼm working on, Iʼm already able to share one more feature for keyboards that have the 102d/105th key, next to left Shift. It is obtained by mapping on this key e.g. the 0x10 modifier, and by allocating this new level to an emulated numerical keypad with hex digits beside Arabic digits, a comma key beside the decimal separator dot key, double and triple zero keys, the zero doubled on VK_0 to complete and to facilitate input of binary numbers, with % and $ and much more, and U+202F on the space bar. In many languages, this is used as a tousands separator, and in all languages before the unit (as in ‘1,234.56 $’). This new “Num” modifier is optional, as is the extra key proper to ISO keyboards. But I strongly recommend to always add the extra toggle Iʼve already mentioned, on key E00 (or instead of Capitals Lock if this is disliked in the target locale). I believe that such keyboards will address the issue. Best regards, Marcel