2012/5/17 Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org>:
> Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
>> But today it's not difficult to type × instead because it is very well
>> supported in many fonts and present in many legacy 8-bit encodings.
>
> I'm completely confused as to how font support and legacy encoding
> support implies keyboard support. Most keyboard layouts don't support
> all of, for example, ISO 8859-1.
You're confused because I did not speak about the keyboard layouts
there. Keyboard layouts are certainly an issue if they cause people to
type an 'x' instead of the multiplication sign ×, something that
occurs in all languages. Such letter x is still intended to be a
multiplication sign semantically in those cases, and typesetters for
printing books (or even some word processors) will replace this
incorrect letter by the appropriate symbol which looks definitely
better.
Many people still type ASCII apostrophe-quotes, even though they are
just approximants for an actual apostrophe with the correct
orentiation. When you're not writing words but some notation
(including epigraphic notations within words), you'll frequently see
approximants : they are acceptable as long as the context does not
cause severe problems of interpretation, because these notations are
not part of the language orthography itself.
In addition, the limitations caused by past standard keyboard layouts
become less relevant today : there are now tons of other facilities
that allow you to personalize your keyboard, or to use other input
methods (notably on screen, or via correctors in word processors).
Typing or entering a multiplication sign is no more difficult today,
and its rendering cause no problem.
Received on Thu May 17 2012 - 15:27:41 CDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Thu May 17 2012 - 15:27:41 CDT