RE: Accessing the WG2 document register

Marcel Schneider <charupdate at orange dot fr> wrote:

> I don't measure exactly the implications of a keyboard compliance to
> a given standard when this standard is developed "on the paper" and
> without taking into consideration all needs and preferences of end-
> users.

ISO did not come up with the 2010 revision to 9995-3 on their own. It
originated with the German NB.

> The Ohm sign you mention reminds me that ISO perpetuated on
> keyboard some deprecated legacy characters that end up anyway to be
> replaced with their canonical equivalent, that in this example is
> Greek capital omega. That's another disconnect.

The relationship between U+2126 OHM SIGN and U+03A9 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER
OMEGA is not at issue here. Neither of these characters is present on US
International.

> And standardizing the dead key registries to exclude all characters
> that are not composed ones, is a counterproductive constraint based on
> the belief that the only way to get aware of the content of a layout
> is to read the keycap labels. This is a way of never getting curly
> quotes and apostrophe.

Dead keys under Windows are not constrained in the way you describe. As
I said earlier today, I use a keyboard on Windows on which all of these
characters are available via dead keys: “ ” ‘ ’ ʼ
 
> I'm very glad to learn there is this good keyboard layout for the USA
> and for the UK, and I wonder very much what's missing for everybody to
> use it.
> Thank you very much, I just downloaded the two drivers and I'm curious
> about how to map nine hundred characters on two levels without
> chaining dead keys!
> Well I didn't look for, because at the beginning I searched for the
> French keyboard.

Since John made the .klc source file available with the download, I'm
sure it would not be too difficult to adapt it to a French-based layout.

> The problem is not about code pages, it is about keeping them vividly
> in users' minds and letting them impact the Unicode Standard while
> since a quarter of a century, Unicode is on.

I'd guess there are very few users who consciously see the use of U+2019
as both apostrophe and right-single-quote as a vestige of code pages, or
as a conscious effort by Evil Microsoft™ to force them into anything.

> There's so much communication about word processing, that there would
> have been a little place to introduce the difference between an
> apostrophe and a single closing quotation mark, but instead of that,
> Microsoft urged Unicode to remove the recommendation and to restore
> the chaos.

Perhaps a UTC member can confirm whether this is fact or speculation.
Markus Kuhn's comment from 1999 about "couldn't Unicode follow
Microsoft...?" doesn't prove that Unicode was in fact strong-armed by
Microsoft.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸