Re: Another take on the English Apostrophe in Unicode

Marcel Schneider <charupdate at orange dot fr> wrote:

> A free tool, the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, allows every user
> to add U+02BC on his preferred keyboard layout

I use John Cowan's Moby Latin keyboard, built with MSKLC, which is 100%
compatible with the AltGr-less US keyboard and supports almost 900 other
characters, including all of the apostrophes and quotes and dashes and
other characters under discussion:

http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2013/09/us-moby-latin-keyboard-for-windows.html

I spent years designing and updating my own keyboard layout and studying
other layouts. I've ended this quest since I started using Moby Latin;
it's the best I've seen in numerous ways.

Elsewhere:

> ISO stands for stability

We wish. Several of us on this list have worked on standards and
standard-like activities that correct for, and defend against,
instability in ISO standards.

> Microsoft’s choice of mashing up apostrophe and close-quote to end up
> with an unprocessable hybrid was wrong. Very wrong.

Windows-1252 and the other Windows code pages were developed during the
1980s, before Unicode, when almost all non-Asian character sets were
limited to 256 code points. The distinctions between apostrophe and
right-single-quote, weighed against the confusion caused by encoding two
identical-looking characters, would never have been sufficient back then
to justify separate encoding in this limited space.

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