I apologize in advance for replying in public to Michka's private message,
but he asked a good question.
>> What I don't want:
>> - Anything that requires me to install Keyman
>
> How come? (Just curious).
I really don't want to install a Big Pre-Packaged Solution and have it do
everything for me, Windows-wide. What I'm looking for is a technical spec
that I can use to build something from scratch for one application.
I'd rather not go through the effort of installing Keyman, especially on the
memory- and disk-challenged machine I'm using here at home, just so I can
load a single keyboard layout, reverse-engineer it, and uninstall Keyman.
That's all I'd really be doing with it, at least for now.
I know there are a lot of Keyman devotees on the list, so if I am greatly
exaggerating the effort vs. payoff, please let me know in a gentle,
flame-free way. Also, if nobody is able to come up with a text description
of the type I wanted, I may have to resort to the Keyman approach anyway.
James Kass wrote:
> Here is an actual layout for IPA UTF-8 entry:
> http://www.elgin.free-online.co.uk/ipa_kb_det.htm
This is weird. Quoting from the page, "Since Unicode UTF-8 encoding codes
each IPA symbol as two characters (bytes), you will have to type two keys for
each letter." Eventually it is revealed that the two-character sequences the
user must type are "based on the SAMPA guidelines for typing IPA using
ASCII." No, this one isn't what I want.
> This page has graphics showing the Mac-IPA layout:
> http://www.matchfonts.com/pages/m-ipa.html
I had seen this page before. This is more like what I had in mind, but it
requires five keyboard states. I know that full IPA support may require more
than 47 * 4 = 182 characters, but I really have to stick to this limit. I
could tolerate supporting only the 182 "most common" IPA characters (whatever
that means) if necessary.
Also, the Mac-IPA layout is presented as a bitmap only, without Unicode code
points or even character names. I'm not familiar enough with IPA to be able
to distinguish, say, U+0279 from U+027A by looking at smallish bitmaps.
But I do appreciate James's effort in looking up these two resources and
letting me know about them.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
(address will soon change to dewell at adelphia dot net)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sat Feb 09 2002 - 20:19:29 EST