A 17:02 99-06-05 -0700, Kenneth Whistler a écrit :
>Also, to echo Peter's concern, entry via hexadecimal Unicode value
>is always going to be a matter of very last resort.
[Alain] Of course and I would say absolutely. The ISO/IEC 14755 standard
offers (among other goodies) a poor man's entry method implementable on any
keyboard to occasionally enter very special characters (in particular those
not on any national keyboard layout), but not limited to this) or when not
all complex resources are available (either national input methods or
national keyboard layouts, which remain the ideal means to enter frequently
used characters). This standard also offers a method to input via the
screen (and it could be from a virtual keyboard layout just like the Mac
does or from a character font table as Windows does -- both marvelously).
However it delivers a few principles, which the "Alt keypad" method was
failing to offer:
-the input of the numeric values is based on UCS ids (*charater catalog
numbers*), *regardless* of the actual code under the hood. Those of us,
like me, who haven been exposed to multiple character sets on the PCs
know how important this problem is.
-feedback is suggested (we were not able to arrive to a consensus on
making this mandatory, but it is highly recommended) when screen input
is done: hence if you click on a shape, the user interface should
give you a hint of what the character is (give its UCS id and eventually
its actual coding)... because in the UCS there are so many characters
with identical or very similar shapes that if you input such a character
and want to retrieve it later on by entering it again, you should have
had a chance to have been made aware of what the object really was when
you entered it.
Alain LaBonté
Project editor, ISO/IEC 14755
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