Such a format for Windows would be quite inadequate since it is missing many things, such as:
1) The version of Windows in which it first shipped (there were minor differences in what was in 9x vs. NT, and on NT some characters were added to keyboards in later versions). 2) The fact that many keystrokes produced more than one keystrokes (called ligatures there athough the technology can apply to code point combinations that do not, in fact make up ligatures) 3) The fact that in many cases combinations of keystrokes produce a single code point (called dead keys) -- best described by the many combining characters that go with individual base characters 4) No completely consistent description of OEM keys that is based on letters that would work for all keyboard hardware 5) Naming inconsistencies between different versions (rare but present on occasion) 6) No good way to explain when CAPS lock is being used for casing, etc. 7) No way to explain SGCAPS use of the CAPS lock, used by Hebrew, Czech and others. 8) No way to describe "custom" shift keys like seen in the [unfortunate] Canadian Multilingual Standard keyboard I could go on. but you get the idea. There is no simple list because there is no simple format that can describe them. MichKa [MS] NLS Collation/Locale/Keyboard Development Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies ----- Original Message ----- From: "Adam Twardoch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Mailing List Unicode" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, December 29, 2003 2:03 PM Subject: Windows and MacOS keyboard layouts in human-readable format? > Do you know if there are human-readable versions of Windows and/or MacOS > keyboard layouts available somewhere? > > I'm looking for a way to compile a table that could look a bit like the > following: > > Platform Language Layout Unicode Keystroke > Windows Polish Polish (Programmers) 0105 AltGr+A > Windows Polish Polish (Programmers) 0041 A > ... > > where I could, for example, look up which exactly keyboard layouts let the > user input, say, a with acute, and how he can do that. > > Thank you in advance, > Adam Twardoch > > > >
