From: Alain LaBonté (alb@sct1.gouv.qc.ca)
Date: Mon Jul 26 2004 - 10:34:00 CDT
À 11:15 2004-07-26, Mark Davis a écrit:
> > a European national keyboard is by itself in general a keyboard group
> composed of three levels (one unshifted, one shifted, one obtained with
> AltGr).
>
>In practice, the keyboards I have seen with an additional level generally
>need and use a pair of additional levels. The issue is that if a lowercase
>character x is on a level, then you want to be able to get the uppercase
>version of it X by using that same level plus a shift key. So in practice
>you end up with plain, plain+shifted, alternate, alternate+shifted.
[Alain] ... which means 2 groups of 2 levels in ISO terms.
Commercial keyboards in Europe (at least those using the Latin script) are
limited to 3 levels in general (3 states: unshifted, shifted, or AltGr
state). In general the third level is for special characters and not for
letter pairs.
I'm just curious: what keyboards have you seen? Was it outside Europe or
the two Americas? Or do you talk about virtual keyboards shown on a screen?
Of course if one needs to use other script beyond the Latin script (or many
languages), one must go beyond 3 levels, i.e. beyond one group.
Alain LaBonté
Québec
PS: Canadian national standard CAN/CSA Z243.200-92 uses 2 groups strictly
for the Latin script, the first group with 3 levels, the second group with
2 extra levels (if you want to *not use* the "group" notion, this means 5
shifted states, 5 levels; fortunately the ISO framework has limited groups
to 3 levels at once).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jul 26 2004 - 10:41:55 CDT