David Starner wrote on 2002-02-22 01:02 UTC: > 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.
The problem is also to find keycap symbols that distinguish hyphen-minus (ASCII) hyphen minus underscore (ASCII) en-dash em-dash if we print them on key caps. If we use different labels for all, it must clearly be something more elaborate than just vorizontal lines of different thickness. English text would be one example, pictures of typical useage of these characters another one. There is also logical arrangement, minus and plus keys should obviously be neighbor keys for instance. Solution without relabeling keyboards: The minus should go on the numeric key pad. This then leaves en/em dash, which I suggest could be put (like the Macintosh does) onto the underscore/hyphen key at AltGr level. The underscoore is longer than the hyphen, equivalently the em dash is longer than the en dash, so the keycaps can be recycled easily. Do we have to distinguish between hyphen-minus and hyphen, or do we leave that to the software (program editors always use hyphen-minus, word processors always use hyphen, same with apostrophe/ single-right-quotation-mark). There is also the option of colour coding (ASCII and non-ASCII key labels have different colour), though that might be less economic than laser labeling. Other scheme: - hyphen-minus and underscore could be printed with a dotted glyph boundary box, to signal their fixed-width/ascii origin (the same could be used for other ASCII characters that should be avoided in normal word processing text, such as tilde, apostrophe and quotation mark) - en/em dash would be on the same key and distinguished by length - minus would be distinguished by proximity to plus and digits. Still collecting ideas ... Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
