Re: Another take on the English Apostrophe in Unicode

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 18:36, Doug Ewell wrote:

> The Level 3 and "Level 4" (Shift+AltGr) allocations of US International
> do not conform in any way to the common secondary layout of either
> 9995-3:2002 or 9995-3:2010. For example, there is no ohm sign on US
> International in any group or level, either at D01 (2002) or D02 (2010).
> Perhaps we are not talking about the same thing when we say "conforms to
> ISO/IEC 9995."

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. 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.

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.

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015, 17:12, Doug Ewell wrote:

> 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.

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.

 
>> 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.

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.

The amazing chance of being able to disambiguate apostrophe and

close-quote has been purposely overridden after Unicode had

published clearly that U+02BC is apostrophe. Nothing was simplier

than letting this recommendation as it was, and tackle the job of

implementing Unicode on Windows, on Microsoft Office, and in the

offices. 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.

I can't believe that was OK. Never, never.

Marcel Schneider

> Message du 15/06/15 18:36
> De : "Doug Ewell"
> A : "Unicode Mailing List"
> Copie à : "Marcel Schneider"
> Objet : RE: Accessing the WG2 document register
>
> Marcel Schneider wrote:
>
> > The US International keyboard layout indeed conforms to ISO/IEC 9995.
> > AFAIK it was preexistent, and was validated for conformance by
> > considering that the AltGr and Shift + AltGr shift states contain the
> > secondary group.
> > I did not think about it as an _implementation_ of ISO/IEC 9995.
>
> "ISO/IEC 9995" is a multi-part standard that covers many different
> aspects of keyboards. US International certainly conforms to many of the
> parts:
>
> • it has alphanumeric, numeric, and editing zones with keys which can
> be referenced by "E01" notation, as per 9995-1
>
> • it has shifting keys which are used to select levels
>
> • the primary layout (Levels 1 and 2) conforms to 9995-2, as does
> practically any Latin-script keyboard
>
> • it has Escape and cursor keys in conformance with 9995-5
>
> • and so on.
>
> The Level 3 and "Level 4" (Shift+AltGr) allocations of US International
> do not conform in any way to the common secondary layout of either
> 9995-3:2002 or 9995-3:2010. For example, there is no ohm sign on US
> International in any group or level, either at D01 (2002) or D02 (2010).
> Perhaps we are not talking about the same thing when we say "conforms to
> ISO/IEC 9995."
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸
>
>
>

> Message du 15/06/15 17:21
> De : "Doug Ewell"
> A : "Unicode Mailing List"
> Copie à :
> Objet : Re: Another take on the English Apostrophe in Unicode
>
> Marcel Schneider 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 🇺🇸
>
>
>
Received on Mon Jun 15 2015 - 12:41:06 CDT