Re: Shortcuts question

For games, the mnemonic meaning of keys are unlikely to be used because
gamers prefer an ergonomic placement of their fingers according to the
physical position for essential commands.
But this won't apply to control keys, as these commands should be single
keystrokes and pressing two keys instead of one would be unpractical and
would be a disavantage when playing.

That's why the four most common 4 direction keys A/D/S/W on a QWERTY layout
will become Q/D/S/Z on a French AZERTY layout. Games that use logical key
layouts based on QWERTY are almost unplayable if there's no interface to
customize these 4 keys. So games preferably use the virtual keys instead
for these commands, or will include builtin layouts adapted for AZERTY and
QWERTZ-based layouts and still display the correct keycaps in the UI: games
normally don't force the switch to another US layout, so they still need to
use the logical layout, simply because they also need to allow users to
input real text and not jsut gaming commands (for messaging, or for
inputing custom players/objects created in the game itself, or to fill-in
user profiles, or input a registration email or to perform online logon
with the correct password), in which case they will also need to support
characters entered with control keys (AltGr, Shift, Control...), or with a
standard tactile panel on screen which will still display the common
localized layouts.

There are difficulties in games when some of their commands are mapped to
something else than just basic Latin letters (including decimal digits : on
a French AZERTY keyboard, the digits are composed by pressing Shift, or in
ShiftLock mode (there's no CapsLock mode as this ShiftLock is also released
when pressing Shift: just like on old French mechanical typewriters,
pressing ShiftLock again did not release it, and this ShiftLock applied to
all keys on the keyboard, including punctuation keys. On PC keyboards,
ShiftLock does not apply to the numeric pad which has its separate NumLock,
now largely redundant and that most users would like to disable completely
each time there's a numeric pad separated from the directional pad, on
these extended keyboards, NumLock is just a nuisance, notably on OS logon
screen when Windows turns it off by default unless the BIOS locks it at
boot time, and lot of BIOS don't do that or don't have the option to set it
permanently).

Le dim. 16 sept. 2018 à 14:18, Marcel Schneider via Unicode <
unicode_at_unicode.org> a écrit :

> On 15/09/18 15:36, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> […]
> > So yes all control keys are potentially localisable to work best with
> the base layout anre remaining mnemonic;
> > but the physical key position may be very different.
>
> An additional level of complexity is induced by ergonomics. so that most
> non-Latin layouts may wish to stick
> with QWERTY, and even ergonomic layouts in the footprints of August Dvorak
> rather than Shai Coleman are
> likely to offer variants with legacy Virtual Key mapping instead of
> staying in congruency with graphics optimized
> for text input. But again that is easier on Windows, where VKs are
> remapped separately, than on Linux that
> appears to use graphics throughout to process application shortcuts, and
> only modifiers can be "preserved" for
> further processing, no underlying letter map that AFAIU appears not to
> exist on Linux.
>
> However, about keyboarding, that may be technically too detailed for this
> List, so that I’ll step out of this thread
> here. Please follow up in parallel thread on CLDR-users instead.
>
> https://unicode.org/pipermail/cldr-users/2018-September/000837.html
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marcel
>
>
>
Received on Sun Sep 16 2018 - 08:29:02 CDT