Carl:
>I was the chairman of the keyboard standards committee for ACCESS.bus
which
>was the predecessor the USB....
>Had they done a better job you could really use the
>field in the device driver and be able to use two keyboards with
different
>keyboard language layout codes.
I wasn't thinking of someone using multiple hardware keyboards. Would
anyone want to switch from one language to another by shuffling physical
keyboards on their desktop? I don't know.
> However Intel got impatient and developed the
>USB standard. Unfortunately they only reserved 8 bits for the keyboard
>language identifier.
Now, this interests me in relation to a completely different topic. The
USB standard supports language IDs? Where can I find out more about that?
>I am not clever enough to figure out how to
>encode 6700 language in 8 bits.
Certainly not at once!
>It is even worse because you can have
>different language layouts. For example there are several very different
>French keyboard layouts.
I convinced myself recently that specifying keyboard layouts needs to be
done in terms of identifier pairs: one ID to specify a
language/writing-system-encoding (e.g. Azerbaijani in Cyrillic Unicode vs.
Azerbaijani in Roman Unicode) together with a particular keyboard layout
(where a given layout determines a mapping from keystroke sequences to
codepoints, and might possibly be used for more than one writing system).
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Oct 03 2001 - 16:30:12 EDT