15.8.2011 13:36, Philippe Verdy wrote:
Don't be surprised then if you see the micro sign on all standard French keyboards of computers (even those sold today). This is the only Greek letter supported there.
I remember that I was surprised at seeing that common Finnish keyboards world produce the micro sign when AltGr+M was used. Only a minority of keyboards have “µ” engraved, though.
As a matter of accuracy, what our keyboards produce is the MICRO SIGN. It is defined as a letter in Unicode, and it is compatibility equivalent to the GREEK SMALL LETTER MU, and typically has the same glyph in modern fonts, but it is not identical to it, and I would not call it a Greek letter (to avoid wrong identification).
And I still don't know why OEMs thought at one time that it would be more important to place this symbol on a well definite key, while at the same time omitting the much more important œ ligature (and forgetting the support of accented capitals)...
Perhaps because the letter “œ” was regarded as a typographic ligature of “o” and “e” rather than a letter historically based on such a ligature. And because it has been common in French, and often even claimed to be correct, to omit diacritic marks from uppercase letters.
It can still be difficult to convince keyboard designers about the need for “œ,” perhaps partly because the letter carries the word LIGATURE in its Unicode (rather unsymmetrically with “æ,” LATIN SMALL LETTER AE). As we know, the name will remain… Even in new products where one might expect to see modern support to characters, “œ” is missing—for example, on my Android, when sending an SMS message, with language set to French, there is no direct way to type letters with diacritic marks or add the marks; and using predictive input, I can get French words mostly spelled properly (e.g., input “garc” lets me select the word “garçon”), but not for “œ” (e.g., input “coe” lets me select “coeur” but not “cœur”).
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
