Re: Combined Yorùbá characters with dot below and tonal diacritics

Luis de la Orden <webalorixa at gmail dot com> wrote:

>> From memory this was a problem we would have with MS Word. Care needs
>> to be taken selecting AltGr sequences to implement in keyboard.
>> And adding frequently typed characters like vowels and tone marks to
>> altgr is usually a bad idea. Easier to move less needed sequences to
>> the altgr state putting feequently type characters on the normal and
>> shift states
>
> Hi Andrew, just a clarification there are pre-composed characters for
> Nigerian languages which use letters with a dot below.
>
> But with regards to the ALt-Gr, there it goes my innocence and feeling
> of accomplishment :)), I had everything linked to the Alt-Gr key and
> did exactly as Ilya said... MS Word is fine, but very specialised
> software such as Photoshop are a pain as their power-user shortcuts
> all use ALT-Gr indeed.

It's true that some very popular software packages define their own
Alt+key or Ctrl+Alt+key combinations, and keyboard layouts that use the
same combinations (as AltGr+key) will conflict with them. I just annoyed
a colleague the other day because my keyboard layout (John Cowan's
delightful Moby Latin [1]) co-opts one of his favorite Visual Studio
shortcuts; he tried to build a project and got U+2022 BULLET instead.

But there are also a lot of keyboard layouts worldwide that do use AltGr
keys. There are only so many keys on a standard keyboard, and if you're
designing a layout and you've made all the tough choices and you still
need to find room for more characters, you pretty much have to go to
AltGr.

It helps to educate users of such a keyboard layout, especially
Americans, that the left and right Alt keys aren't the same. Americans
tend not to expect this, because the standard U.S. keyboard doesn't use
AltGr at all and the key isn't marked as such.

[1]
http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2013/09/us-moby-latin-keyboard-for-windows.html

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸