Re: Wogb3 j3k3: Pre-Unicode substitutions for extended characters live on

On Tue, 11 Oct 2016 15:52:20 +0000, Don Osborn wrote:
[…]
>
> The problem is input systems, not availability of fonts as it once was. Keyboard
> layouts exist for Ga and other Ghanaian languages, and these enable typing needed
> extended Latin characters. But a number of them, including possibly all for mobile
> devices, work by substituting selected key assignments, which in the case of
> multilingual text would apparently mean switching keyboards to accommodate
> characters not present in both/all languages used. Not ideal.
>
[…]

AIUI, what is drawing people away from getting able to efficiently input
Extended Latin alongside with Basic Latin, is the fear of becoming unable
to efficiently input digits as soon as these donʼt show up in the Base shift
state any longer.

Thus IMHO it could be interesting for many more of the worldʼs languages
to see that there is a good reason to depart from the typical layout pattern
that has the digits in the Base shift state, and to see that this is in
practice feasible inside the system input framework, which doesnʼt have
so much of the severe limitations that are often pointed. These mainly
result from the appearance that the Windows keyboarding framework is given
in the MSKLC UI, while the author of this useful software himself invited
his users to expand the features by using the included Keyboard Table
Generation Tool (Unicode) 3.40.
So do I, FWIW.

While still being very busy with the French keyboard layouts that Iʼm
working on, Iʼm already able to share one more feature for keyboards that
have the 102d/105th key, next to left Shift. It is obtained by mapping on
this key e.g. the 0x10 modifier, and by allocating this new level to an
emulated numerical keypad with hex digits beside Arabic digits, a comma
key beside the decimal separator dot key, double and triple zero keys,
the zero doubled on VK_0 to complete and to facilitate input of binary
numbers, with % and $ and much more, and U+202F on the space bar.
In many languages, this is used as a tousands separator, and in all
languages before the unit (as in ‘1,234.56 $’).

This new “Num” modifier is optional, as is the extra key proper to ISO
keyboards. But I strongly recommend to always add the extra toggle Iʼve
already mentioned, on key E00 (or instead of Capitals Lock if this is
disliked in the target locale).

I believe that such keyboards will address the issue.

Best regards,

Marcel
Received on Fri Oct 14 2016 - 08:18:01 CDT