On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 07:29:40PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote: > Unfortunately, getting it onto keyboards won't get it programmed into > users' fingers. The real answer to this one, I'm afraid, has to be in the > software, not in the keyboards. People *will* go on typing the same > character for hyphen, dash, and minus. Even if all three showed up on the > keycaps (not just as mystical shift-alt-meta combinations), which would be > much harder to arrange, it wouldn't have the desired effect until a new > generation of users grew up. The software is just going to have to get > smarter about how it renders what the user types.
I once tried to type a short document with some light mathematical content in WordPerfect. I told it "The square root of -1 is i". It displayed "The square root of -1 is I". Not being able to mess with the options (this being a library machine), I gave up. Software being too smart is usually a pain, unless they've got the read-my-mind code working right. Especially here - how do you distinguish between the hyphen, the em-dash, the minus and the soft hyphen? Any sort of software-smarts is going to have to be heavily backed up by user-smarts. There is a step between shift-alt-meta and printed on the keycaps. An English (non-programmers) keyboard could be designed and distributed in software. It's not impossible that Microsoft could support such a thing and keyboard manufacturers start making the things, meaning the next generation actually reliably gets it right. -- David Starner / Давид Старнэр - [EMAIL PROTECTED] What we've got is a blue-light special on truth. It's the hottest thing with the youth. -- Information Society, "Peace and Love, Inc." -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
