Re: Dead keys (was: "Re: Monetary decimal separators")

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Sep 17 2005 - 21:25:40 CDT

  • Next message: Jukka K. Korpela: "Re: Dead keys (was: "Re: Monetary decimal separators")"

    From: "Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin" <antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt>
    > On 2005.09.17, 19:23, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
    >
    >> keyboard in Widows drivers, by SILENTLY replacing the keys for ASCII
    >> backquote and ASCII tilde by deadkeys for the COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT
    >> and COMBINING TILDE.
    >
    > Are you sure these keys were assigned to U+0300 and U+0303? I'd bet not.

    Don't bet, I am sure they are, but only as *dead keys*, they don't produce a
    character until a second character is entered which determine the final
    character(s) which are output.

    Most of the valid sequences generate a precombined character with the
    corresponding diacritic. These dead keys followed by a space don't generate
    the combining character but a spacing diacritic.

    When the dead key is followed by a non-recognized second character key,
    there's no standard for the generated sequence, so the output may be
    anything.

    On a typewriter, the same keys would have produced the non-spacing diacritic
    in all cases without waiting for a second character.

    On Windows, it generates the spacing character followed by the second
    character. If the second character was a dead key too, that sequence is
    output by transforming the too into spacing diacritics. For invalid
    sequences, on DOS/Windows only, the transformation of a combining tilde dead
    key or the combining grace into a spacing diacritic uses the ASCII symbol
    rather than the other spacing diacritics. But this is just an error
    indicator rather than a valid input.

    I don't know what MacOS (X) generates for such non-recognized sequences.
    Same thing about Unix/Linux and other systems. So all this depends on the
    implementation of the keyboard driver.

    The only standard about these dead keys is the effective role they do have
    as an input method for entering the effective combining diacritic to apply
    to a second character. There's no real difference with what you describe for
    the portuguese keyboard, whch also generates its own non standardized
    sequences...



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