Re: Combining Marks and Keyboard Input on GUI systems (was:

From: peter_constable@sil.org
Date: Tue Oct 05 1999 - 15:30:49 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).

       I thought you *were* supposed to do this, but I'm still
       learning what's involved in localisation. I would have thought
       that most shortcut keys are intended to be
       mnemonic, e.g. "F" for "file", and this would be
       language-specific.

       With the use of COM/Automation in VBA, this is a non-issue
       since the menu hotkeys are not intended to be used to access
       application functionality programmatically -- there should be a
       COM interface exposed. With the (not terribly extensive) amount
       I have worked with VBA in Word, Excel and Access, I *very much*
       prefer this way of doing things to what I had learned to do in
       Excel 4, Wordbasic, and Word 3 & 4 for DOS before that. I
       wouldn't complain one bit if someone decided to add VBA or
       similar scripting support to a good text editor, or perhaps an
       XML editor.

       Peter



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