Subject: Re: keyboard input of arbitrary characters
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu Apr 26 2001 - 14:25:56 CDT
At 10:43 PM 4/17/01 +0200, Mike Nordell wrote:
>Paul Rohr wrote:
>> I really like the idea of having a keyboard-driven ALT+ mechanism to input
>> arbitrary characters, but rather than stick to Windows-specific codepage
>> conventions, wouldn't we want to somehow specify *Unicode* characters as
>the
>> alternative to ANSI?
>
>I think that's the job of any IME, or do you from the top of your head
>remember the decimal representation of e.g 0xe000 (start of user defined
>chars I think)? :-)
Of course I haven't memorized all of Unicode. My only point was that from a
UI standpoint it might be nice if we had a keyboard-driven way for all
platforms to add common stuff like:
#define UCS_EN_SPACE ((UT_UCSChar)0x2002)
#define UCS_EM_SPACE ((UT_UCSChar)0x2003)
#define UCS_EN_DASH ((UT_UCSChar)0x2013)
#define UCS_EM_DASH ((UT_UCSChar)0x2014)
#define UCS_BULLET ((UT_UCSChar)0x2022)
#define UCS_LQUOTE ((UT_UCSChar)0x2018)
#define UCS_RQUOTE ((UT_UCSChar)0x2019)
#define UCS_LDBLQUOTE ((UT_UCSChar)0x201c)
#define UCS_RDBLQUOTE ((UT_UCSChar)0x201d)
Those I *would* memorize, and knowing that I could enter any arbitrary
character that way is pretty comforting.
Failing that, we should (eventually) do one or both of the following:
- extend the symbol dialog to input all Unicode symbols available
- create explicit shortcuts for common punctuation characters
>> Just a thought. In any event, I'd happily give up the existing ALT+1,2,3
>> keybindings if that's what's needed to get a mechanism like this
>implemented
>> in a clean XP fashion.
>
>I think they can coexist. Windows (or rather, the IBM-"compatible" x86 PC,
>it's a BIOS thingie I think) only allow this numeric input using the numeric
>keypad.
OK. I'm not familiar with the Windows convention here. Sounds like a great
way to enter stuff from limited codepages, but a poor XP solution for us.
From rescanning the #defines above, it looks like I want to enter the
canonical hex values, so a numeric-keypad-only solution wouldn't work for me
anyhow. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.
Paul
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