Re: Sporadic Unicode revisited

From: Mark Davis (mark.davis@jtcsv.com)
Date: Wed Oct 02 2002 - 13:28:34 EDT

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    Those "mnemonics" in (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1345.html) are pretty
    useless in practice, as well as being misnamed. From Websters: "assisting or
    intended to assist memory". So what about the combination <;S> is supposed
    to aid or assist memory in coming up with U+02BF MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF
    RING? Beats me.

    They are really just some set of more or less obscure short abbreviations
    for some Unicode characters. I doubt that they ever had any user testing for
    comprehension, and if even if they are deployed somewhere, I've never heard
    of any significant group of people actually using them in practice. In
    practice, if they were to be used in an IME, there would have to be some
    kind of switch to initiate typing one of these things. They are context
    sensitive (they overlap), so it would also need some kind switch to indicate
    the end of them. That is: THI could be <\u00DE, H> or <T, \u2253> or <T, H,
    I>.

    Mark
    __________________________________
    http://www.macchiato.com
    ► “Eppur si muove” ◄

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>
    To: "'Martin Kochanski'" <unicode@cardbox.net>; <unicode@unicode.org>
    Cc: "'Keld Jørn Simonsen'" <keld@dkuug.dk>
    Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 08:08
    Subject: RE: Sporadic Unicode revisited

    > Martin Kochanski wrote:
    > > To come back to the old thread about typing arbitrary Unicode
    > > characters in situations where it's not worth installing a
    > > special keyboard, I thought that people might be interested
    > > in the hexadecimal Alt+ numeric-keypad solution that we're
    > > implementing. As implementations of ISO 14755 go, it seems
    > > reasonably simple; but comments would be welcome. You can
    > > find a description of the input method at
    > > http://www.cardbox.net/client/unicode.htm, near the bottom of
    > > the page. Remember that this is a fallback method and not
    > > intended for long runs of text!
    > >
    > > If there are any inaccuracies or obscurities in that page, it
    > > would also be good to hear about those.
    > >
    > > (Well, not good exactly, but useful).
    >
    > Nice! Of course, the drawback is that one must have a Unicode chart at
    hand,
    > but this is clearly much better than having to convert codes to decimal.
    >
    > I wonder whether anyone considered implementing an IME based on mnemonic
    > codes, such as those described in RFC 1345
    > (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1345.html)?
    >
    > _ Marco
    >
    >



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