From: Bob_Hallissy@sil.org
Date: Thu Jan 15 2004 - 04:43:13 EST
On 14/01/2004 20:18:51 Philippe Verdy wrote:
>There's nothing in the default keyboard drivers to allow you input
directly
>from the keyboard, characters that are not in your current Windows code
page
>(the default keyboard drivers will not return characters outside of this
>codepage).
>
>When this support is added, it does not come from the keyboard driver
>itself, but from GUI input components like rich-edit controls, which will
>remap the keyboard events using alternate conversion rules to generate
>characters outside of the current Windows ANSI codepage (for example by
>mapping AltGr+x followed by hexadecimal Unicode code point).
>
I think you are painting a picture that is more bleak than need be:
1) On Win 2K/XP (assuming a Unicode application), keyboard drivers are not
restricted to characters that are in the "current Windows code page". You
can use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to build a keyboard driver that
generates any Unicode character you want. (Such keyboards will *not* work
as expected on non-Unicode apps as the OS has no way to translate the
Unicode character into a codepage char.)
2) Both of the above restrictions (OS and application) can be worked
around using WM_UNICHAR keyboard messages rather than WM_CHAR. This
requires special keyboard software (e.g., Tavultesoft Keyman) and
applications that are aware of WM_UNICHAR (I think RichEdit and MS
Publisher, as well as various 3rd party sw).
Bob
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