Re: [OT?] LCD/LED Keyboard
It appears my response from this morning didn't make it to the list, so here it is again. I apologize if this results in a duplicate. Alex. Since I did look into all the issues before that are mentioned in this thread, let me respond to them. The applications of dynamic keycaps are pretty broad. To people on this list the need to remember different keyboard layouts, dead-keys, compose sequences, level and group shifts, are a daily necessity and could be greatly simplified. The counter-argument is often that touch-typists don't look at the keys anyway, which is under closer examination actually not true. Even a proficient touch-typist will have to find less frequently used key combinations and often will end up writing a key sequence cheat sheet or mark up keycaps. The benefit for learning a new keyboard layout or for accessing rarely used characters is obvious. I very occasionally would like to be able to access Cyrillic or Greek characters, yet have to relearn the layout or use an on-screen display to find them every time. Another application I was eluding to was what I termed modal (or complex) input environments. What I mean by that is that despite the efforts of human interface researchers, many computer programs constantly shift between different input modes and key sequences change meaning based on it. For UNIX users, VI and Emacs are a painfully obvious example. But even less extreme cases come to mind. When hitting the ALT key in Windows, the menus of your window become accessible through keyboard shortcuts. If the 'F' key would then read File or maybe 'F4' would read Quit, shortcuts would be more easily learned and user efficiency would go up. If you remember the WPS word-processing keyboards DEC used to ship or the lay-on templates that came with every copy of Wordstar, the utility of this too should be obvious. After all, there is a reason why we have some keys already labeled 'Home' or 'Backspace'. The issues of implementation technology, cost and price came up. I talked to the eInk folks a while back and while their technology looks like it is going into the right direction, matrix addressable eInk isn't quite there yet. LCD, OLED, and related technologies seem more practical, but power consumption would be a problem. In a first generation product a separate power supply could be acceptable, but most users would not want to deal with it. Cost is uncertain and will be necessarily much higher than for a regular keyboard. Off-setting the initial RD through the price of the product seems like a bad idea since that would increase the price differential even more. The corollary being that a large company has a better chance of manufacturing such a device successfully than a small one. In terms of price, I have talked to numerous people and the general consensus seems to be that people would expect to pay more that US$100 and less than US$1,000. The cost savings are hard to quantify, but in the case of a multi-national IT manager, not having to stock different devices for different locales, does introduce a tangible saving. While I am happy to have an opportunity to share my thoughts on this topic, I am not sure how appropriate further discussion on the Unicode list would be. If anybody who reads this is in a position to more seriously investigate this topic, please contact me directly since it is an area in which I am greatly interested. Alex.
Re: [OT?] LCD/LED Keyboard
I think it really depends on how people work. I am using an on-screen display frequently, but cannot afford to have it up all the time since it eats up screen real estate and also won't travel when switching virtual desktops/workspaces. I agree that these are fairly minor implementation issues though that can be resolved. While I also agree with your ergonomical comment in principal, I have found both for myself as well as many other people I have worked with that they will inevitably look at the keyboard as soon as they move outside the standard graphical keys they are all used to. I myself have been in situations where I had to switch keyboard layouts (as well as actual physical key arrangement) several times a day and just finding something like an ampersand or a dollar sign proved difficult. The immediacy of having the correct symbol printed on the key I am supposed to hit is, in my opinion, superior to having to derive the physical key location from an on-screen rendition of the keyboard. Not that the latter isn't useful and I do not doubt that it works better for some people. Another area of application that I already eluded to in my previous posting is the use of function keys. Since sufficiently complex, graphical applications frequently remap keys including the standard graphical keys, their users will replace the keycaps with often times color-coded keys that have symbols in addition to letters printed on them. I have seen this in different business fields including finance and A/V. Alex. --On Friday, July 25, 2003 11:44:21 AM -0700 Kenneth Whistler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Count me among the people who wouldn't.
Re: [OT?] LCD/LED Keyboard
I have been looking into this for many years and talked to numerous keyboard manufacturers. While the benefits of such a device are obvious for multilingual computing, heavily modal software would benefit from it as well. It appears that the production cost would be too high for most manufacturers to be of commercial interest though. I can forward a scan from a magazine news column (February 1986) where such a device was actually offered. If anybody is seriously interested in pursuing this, I would be more than happy to discuss it. Alex. --On Thursday, July 24, 2003 9:25 PM +0200 Don Osborn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This very idea was brought up a few months ago at http://lists.kabissa.org/lists/archives/public/a12n-collaboration/msg0041 1.html (see end of message). It's a dream that would facilitate making the most of Unicode's potential, and hopefully it's already on the drawing board somewhere.
Re: [OT?] LCD/LED Keyboard
As a proof-of-concept, this would be perfectly valid and reasonably easy to implement. As a product however, I don't think too many people would go for it. The group of people who are interested in zero key-travel keyboards (be they projection, sensor keys, reflection) is pretty finite and I would wonder if there is any significant overlap with the group of people who would want dynamic keycaps. As an aside, some years ago I saw an old 16mm film from Bell Labs(?) that showed projection on a glass surface for a complex switch operator interface. Also, a former coworker of an acquaintance of mine is working on a laser-based keyboard that uses beam interruption as its key switch. His motivation is an extreme case of RSI. Alex. --On Thursday, July 24, 2003 4:39 PM -0700 J Do [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How about exploring a software solution, based on the projection keyboard concept: http://www.alpern.org/weblog/stories/2003/01/09/projectionKeyboards.html ?
Re: [OT] o-circumflex
My impression is that at least in U.S. states, which are more heavily populated by native Spanish speakers, the one diacritic, which is frequently viewed by English speakers as non-optional to differentiate two words (specifically proper names) is the tilde as used for the eñe. There is a college in Redwood City, CA, which is called Cañada College and, which is off of Cañada Road. I haven't checked thoroughly, but I believe most road signs there use the eñe. I do know of one highway exit in the area though which spells it Canada College. Alex.
Re: Query, please help
Since he wants math symbols on his buttons, which presumably would not require localization, using images is not really blasphemous. I have a somewhat related question: With the Euro coming up in a mere seven months I still see the symbol mostly as an embedded graphic in Web pages. Does anybody have a good idea how widely used Unicode or 8859-15 are for Web pages that require the Euro symbol? Alex.
Vulgar fractions. was Re: Microsoft Word Query
This discussion reminds me: Somewhere either in TUS3.0 or on the Web site there was a comment made about the encoded vulgar fractions being insufficient for, e.g., U.S. stock market quotes and that one should therefore use font properties to represent fractions instead. Of course, I cannot find this comment anymore, but I wanted to point out that decimalization of the U.S. stock markets is well underway and the NASDAQ, for example, fully converts on April 9, 2001. If someone can find the remark I am talking about, it might be a good idea to delete the stock market reference. Alex.
Plane 1 Mathematical Alphanumerics and physical quantities.
Question: Are Plane 1 Mathematical Alphanumerics intended to be used for expressing physical quantities? Simple example: For force (F) should I use 0x46 or 0x1D439 since it is frequently typeset in italics? Thanks, Alex.
Re: Plane 1 Mathematical Alphanumerics and physical quantities.
Sounds very reasonable. Thanks! Alex. Question: Are Plane 1 Mathematical Alphanumerics intended to be used for expressing physical quantities? No. Simple example: For force (F) should I use 0x46 or 0x1D439 since it is frequently typeset in italics? Use U+0046 and markup, *unless* you are doing extensive representation of math *and* are making use of an implementation that represents math with the mathematical alphanumerics. --Ken
Miscellaneous comments/questions.
Hi! I just returned from a lengthy trip through parts of Europe and thought I mention some observations. In Greece, I noticed that almost all signs used monotonic Greek. I saw some older road signs and a couple of store signs that used polytonic Greek, but according to a Greek acquaintance, everybody is very happy to not have to deal with it anymore. When did the switch actually happen? He claimed it was only about a decade ago? What was interesting to see was how the printing of the tonos varied. For the most part it did look like a steeper acute as described in Chapter 7.2 of Unicode 3. A number of times, I did see a variation though which looked more like, e.g., U+03B1 U+0307, but I suspect that to be just a font style. I also noticed that frequently, certain characters are written in variants which at first were completely indecipherable to me. I especially recall the beta (U+03D0), theta (U+03D1), and maybe pi (U+03D6) as well as the upper-case upsilon (U+03D2.) As someone who learned classical Greek in school, it added to the problems I already had with the modern pronunciation of a lot of the letters ;-) One thing I found very confusing was the mixing of Latin and Greek script which is very common on billboards. A couple of times I found myself unable to tell whether a word was spelled in Latin or Greek since it only used glyphs which both scripts share and hence I could not derive the proper pronunciation at first. It was interesting to see some brand name products and proper names transcribed while sometimes Latin script is used in mid-sentence for foreign words. A similar issue was very interesting to observe in France and Germany. The use of the English language in advertisement seems to run rampant in Germany while almost all ads that include English in France (mostly tag lines) are followed by an asterisk and the literal French translation somewhere near the edge of the sign. At first I thought it was somewhat silly but when I saw how the German language currently is absorbing English words like a sponge, the footnotes seemed to make sense. While in Germany, I bought a children's book that was first published in 1921 and used a simplified Fraktur. As a native German, I had no problems reading it, but for my wife who doesn't have German as her native language, the long-s did throw her off at first. After I explained the logic behind it, it was a lot easier, but she did make a good point as to why it isn't used in the "sp" digraph. Maybe Otto can shed some light on this? In looking at older Fraktur text, it was very interesting to see how foreign words are set in an Antiqua font similar to how in English text foreign words are often in italics (and similar to the use of Latin script in Greek above.) This brings up a font question I have been wondering about for a long time: How similar are typesetting features of fonts across different scripts? It seems that most European scripts have print and cursive versions (I saw some beautiful cursive signs in Greece), serifs and mono-spaced fonts, and boldness and slant seems to be common as well. But what about other scripts? It seems that all(?) scripts currently represented in Unicode have at least some typographical tradition albeit only scholarly in some cases. How much of the features are overlapping, i.e., how much sense does it make to define a serif font for CJK scripts? What about italics in Arabic? Can there be a font family which covers all the scripts in Unicode and which complies with the local typographic esthetics? I apologize for the glyph-centric nature of the question ;-) Two other topics of discussion that came up in recent weeks were very interesting to me: Time zones and location names. The latter was something I have been curious about myself for a while. It is true that in Germany for example, rarely the state (Bundesland) is indicated when referring to a location. When ambiguity arises, regional names or other landmarks are used to distinguish, sometimes to the point of becoming part of the name. Examples: Hamm (Westfalen) and Frankfurt am Main versus Frankfurt an der Oder. Even more interesting to me though would be the local name of places and I would love to find a World Atlas who first indicates every location's name in the local language and script, then the accepted Latin transliteration, and finally the name in English (or, say, German, if published in Germany.) Are the large publishing houses equipped to produce something like this? Or more importantly, would they use Unicode for it? What about smaller printers (like for business cards?) The other issue that was brought up about time zones is fascinating. A while ago, when I was looking into locale issues, it occurred to me that there really needs to be a comprehensive database of "cultural defaults." For extensive localization, you need to know more than just date format, language, and script (OK, I am oversimplifying the extent of the locale information.)
