From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 10:18:13 EST
At 14:53 +0000 2003-12-18, Arcane Jill wrote:
>Oh wow. Well, the range of different keyboard
>layouts I see around me is something else!
>(Especially on laptops).
>
>Now here's something weird. Just about every
>standard, fully-size, desktop, (British) QWERTY
>keyboard I have ever seen, has the legend for
>U+00A6 BROKEN BAR as the shifted symbol printed
>on the key to the immediate left of Z (with the
>unshifted symbol being backslash), and the
>legend for U+007C VERTICAL LINE as the third
>symbol printed on the key to the immediate left
>of 1 (with the unshifted and shifted symbols
>being backquote (U+0060, officially GRAVE
>ACCENT) and the aforementioned "not sign"
>(U+00AC) respectively). Thus, you would expect
><shift + backslash> to yeild BROKEN BAR, and you
>would expect <alt-gr + backquote> to yield
>VERTICAL LINE, because that's what printed on
>the keys.
On the Mac, the situation is a bit different. On
older keyboards, the grave/tilde `~ key was to
the left of the 1; on newer ones, that key is to
the left of the Z, and to the left of the 1 is
the section/plus-minus §± key. Then on the other
side of the keyboard, older keyboards had the
backslash/vertical-bar key to the right of the
equals-sign; newer keyboards have this key to the
right of the apostrophe key.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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