From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Thu May 19 2005 - 13:00:37 CDT
At 17:31 +0200 2005/05/19, JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
>Your keyboard ideas were also good. Did you pursue?
With the Ukelele program
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ukelele
anyone can, on Mac OS X, develop their own keyboard layout. I am of
course, mainly interested in one for math, so I do not have to use
the drag and drop method otherwise only available via the Mac
"Character Palette". But if one should attempt to make a universal
keyboard layout for math, then that is very difficult, in view high
number of characters. It is possible to use the left and right
modifier keys independently, but then it is hard to type. It is not
possible, to easily switch keyboard maps via the function keys,
unless one is doing some scripting perhaps. Perhaps one should move
away from the QWERTY layout, just listing them in alphabetical order,
but then the letters are not so easily identifiable from a standard
keyboard. So one is perhaps speaking about more than one keyboard
layout, one QWERTY for backwards compatibility, and one alphabetical
for the future, here. There is also a problem to find a suitable
font. Many of the math glyphs are available in PS and True Type
designs, so the problem is to get them into the right positions in a
Unicode font.
In the end, I wanted to use this stuff for a theorem prover I am
writing on. I have started to implement Unicode by merely plugging in
UTF-8 in the .l file, and it works just fine. The next step would be
to implement Unicode character classes by the method I have posted
here and in the Flex list. But in the end, I will have to focus on my
programming, and taking the other stuff step by step.
-- Hans Aberg
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