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From: andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: generalised alphabets
Message-ID: <483@kuling.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 14-Sep-87 21:23:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: kuling.483
Posted: Mon Sep 14 21:23:09 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 16-Sep-87 06:15:51 EDT
References: <15488@mordor.s1.gov> <573@l.cc.purdue.edu> <2342@xanth.UUCP>
Reply-To: andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson)
Organization: Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 39

In article <2342@xanth.UUCP> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
>The goal for the typest, after all, is a bit of flexibility.  One may
>want to type "a" then "raised circle", another the opposite order.  If
>an overstrike key were implemented, and it specificly understood that
>the characters typed while it was held / bytes between the overstrike
>markers were order independent, this would take care of lots of
>languages which decorate letters, the infamous APL keyboard, and
>perhaps some other problems.

I think keyboard design is a problem which should be kept separate from
text representation. While there is a need for a common standard to
identify the characters as abstract items and displaying them in an
unambigous way on any screen or sheet of paper, few people will actually
need the ability to type each character or ideograph themselves.

Keyboards are very much subject to regional and individual taste, and I
think they will continue to be so. Semi-advanced keyboards will of course
contain some extra modifier keys for producing various "foreign" characters,
although they will probably have separate keys for what's common locally.

I wouldn't accept pressing two or three keys in a row just to produce some
of the vowels which are particular to Swedish, but I wouldn't mind using
that method for typing an occasional accented "e" in some French name for
instance. Turkish keyboards won't care about these, but will probably have
dotted and undotted "i" separated instead, and so on.

Ideally, there should be a common keyboard interface standard, giving me
the ability to bring my own (perhaps customized) keyboard when going
abroad, and have the right things appear on the screen when I plug it into
a Japanese workstation and start typing... That's flexibility!

Keyboard layout standardisation is of course an important issue, but
where to put which modifier keys and how to use them seems to belong
more to the problem of QWERTY vs. AZERTY than to international, digital
text representation.
-- 
Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Phone: +46 18 183170
UUCP: andersa@kuling.UUCP (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!andersa)