From: Marion Gunn (mgunn@egt.ie)
Date: Mon Sep 19 2005 - 05:27:49 CDT
Scríobh Philippe Verdy:
> ...
> If displays did not have this limitation, diacritics would have been entered
> normally and made immediately visible on display, without advancing the
> cursor, and the next input character would have been composed with the
> existing diacritic displayed under the cursor. You should really know that
> some computers were behaving this way, and effectively produced a visible
> glyph on screen immediately, without delay. It's just a shame that PCs have
> abandoned this behavior.
>
> But if it had not, Unicode would have probably been created by encoding also
> the base characters AFTER the diacritics instead of before them (the
That is true.
I remember moving from typewriter to mainframe, where I had to get used
to having no deadkey, and having to devise the workaround of using
forward slash '/' for acute, backward slash '\' for grave, etc., AFTER
the vowel.
I got quite used to doing that at high speed on green or black screens
in virtually dark computer rooms, I then had to readjust again when
computers 'advanced' to having dead key characters entered BEFORE the
vowel, which is how it works on all the machines I have now.
mg
> Teletext and Videotex encodings which are still in use today also encode
> diacritics before the base character... and the French keyboards for the
> associated devices also don't have "dead" keys but compose the diacritic; to
> avoid composition errors however, for composed sequences that the display
> can't handle, it was allowed to delay the input until the base character was
> composed; then the whole sequence for the diacritic and the base character
> was output; if a composed sequence was not supported by the display, the
> whole input was not output, and there was an error indication with a audible
> beep and a fast flashing cursor).
-- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * mgunn@egt.ie * eamonn@egt.ie *
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