Re: Combining Marks and Keyboard Input on GUI systems (was: Re: A basic question on encoding Latin characters)

From: Adrian Havill (havill@turbolinux.co.jp)
Date: Tue Oct 05 1999 - 13:01:57 EDT


> > Even in the GUI world, as many have pointed out already, we commonly see
> > single-letter shortcuts in dropdown menus. Suppose a German application
> > has:
> >
> > [Ö]ffnen
> > [O]rdnen

Aren't you not supposed to localize/internationalize the hot-keys? If you
did, you would break keyboard macro short-cut programs (they would have to
have a localized version of the macro file for each language).

As a person that's done support for international (or, "internationally
lost") users-- i.e. English speakers that can't read Japanese and are using
a Japanese app or vice versa, this is also a blessing as you can guide
someone over the phone on how to set their software via the hotkeys (even if
they can't read the setting screen).

I believe there's some other issues (accessibility? for those that need to
use the hot-keys, you don't want to complicate the input (e.g. the use of
dead keys or an IME)), which is why hotkeys are not I18Nized/L10Nized.



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