Carl W. Brown <cbrown at xnetinc dot com> wrote:
> The old DOS Brazilian keyboard was one of the best kept secrets. It
> would work for a lot of different languages not just Portuguese. For
> example he mentions using the "~" with a vowel. The Brazilian
> keyboard worked with "n" as well for languages like Spanish even
> though it is not valid for Portuguese. I wish that they provided one
> for Windows.
For Unicode-enabled systems, a really nice thing that keyboard driver
designers could do would be to design the dead keys (combining
diacritical marks) so they combine with the widest possible variety of
base letters, not just those used in whatever the "target language" is
perceived to be. That way, Felipe would already have his
vowels-plus-tilde for free. (For systems that use 8-bit code pages, of
course, the designer is limited to what's in the code page.)
An even more "Unicode" thing to do would be to have the diacritic key
generate an *actual combining mark*, and then perhaps do some
rudimentary NFC in the driver, so if the user pressed a + ~ (imagine
U+0303 here) he would get U+00E3, and if he pressed b + ~ he would get
U+0062 U+0303.
That second approach would have the effect that keyboard driver
designers could no longer overload keys the way they do now. For me,
this would be a blessing. I don't currently use the existing "U.S.
International" keyboard in Windows because this behavior gets in my way
so often when typing English. Typing a double quotation mark (U+0022)
followed by a vowel, for instance, generates a vowel with diaeresis, and
I have to play the space-backspace game if I really wanted the quotation
mark. Disunifying the combining accent keys from the ASCII keys -- say,
moving the combining accent keys to the Alt+Ctrl or AltGr shift level --
would allow the behavior I described above without this annoying side
effect.
Just a thought or two.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Aug 22 2002 - 22:25:18 EDT