Re: ISO 9995 terminology

From: Alain LaBont\i - SCT (alb@riq.qc.ca)
Date: Sat Sep 27 1997 - 18:00:38 EDT


A 12:28 97-09-27 -0700, Geoffrey P Waigh a écrit :
>On Sat, 27 Sep 1997, Alain LaBonté - SCT wrote:
>
>> In the series of ISO/IEC 9995, if you have a limited budget, the most
>> important parts for a programmer, imho, are part 3 (international keyboard
>> layout) and part 7 (symbols and description of functions with their names,
>> in English and French).

[Geoffrey] :
>I may have seen 9995 at one point, but it is not in my library at home and
>my current job is away from the internationalization realm (I don't
>suppose anyone knows about using Unicode with SAP?) Is there any support
>for non-PC style keyboards?

[Alain] :
Yes, have a look at ISO/IEC 9995-2 for geometry (it is very general).

[Geoffrey] :
>PC keyboards are very unsuitable for
>hand-held terminals and other applications where form-factor issues place
>strong constraints on keyboard layouts. Also the strong emphasis on
>chording keys in one standard (I'm assuming 9995) was problematic since we
>designed the hardware to support only a single key being depressed at one
>time.

[Alain] :
ISO/IEC 9995 is very general, it describes keyboards for almost every use.
It does not deal with hardware. For example, part 8 even deals with bank
teller machines and telephone keypads' allocation of letters (like Q's on 7
and Z's on 9 (: ).

[Geoffrey] :
>While I'm in favour of not having to find the half-dozen wandering keys
>everytime I sit down in front of a computer, this is one standard I would
>not want to see in a company's "all products must conform to" list.

[Alain] :
ISO/IEC 9995 has been implemented on PCs, on Macs, on Sun machines, on IBM
327X and so on.
Symbols of ISO/IEC 9995-7 have been implemented on different keyboards as
well, including Macs, IBM desktop and portable keyboards (even American
makes, without counting European ones nor Canadian, of course), and so on.

Alain LaBonté
Québec



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