From: Jim Allan (jallan@smrtytrek.com)
Date: Thu Dec 18 2003 - 11:45:38 EST
Arcane Jill wrote:
> 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_.
This goes back to various early forms of ASCII in which standards
differed as to whether the broken bar or the unbroken bar was the
preferred form for the ASCII character.
The original IBM PC character set, code page 437, used the broken bar
which was the preferred form at that time. Accordingly that is what
appeared on keyboards.
The ISO 8859 character sets officially made the broken bar glyph the
proper one for the ASCII character and introduced the broken bar glyph
as a separate extended character in ISO 8859-1 for compatibility with
EBCDIC which had always distinguished the two glyphs as separate characters.
Graphic DOS character sets in the PC generally followed suit as did the
various Windows character sets and font creators.
But computer hardware manufacturers and keyboard manufacturers didn't
notice and continued to use the old broken bar glyph on keyboards even
though it was now incorrect.
Only in the past couple of years have I seen that new keyboards
generally have the correct non-broken glyph.
Similarly PC keyboards usually show an angled apostrophe because the
terminal font glyph for ASCII apostrophe in the original PC DOS terminal
character sets was an angled glyph (which was correct for the ASCII of
that time). Indeed the angled apostrophe still appears in DOS fonts.
Jim Allan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Dec 18 2003 - 12:54:56 EST