Subject: Re: keyboard input of arbitrary characters
From: Mike Nordell (tamlin@algonet.se)
Date: Thu Apr 26 2001 - 15:15:33 CDT
I might start this post by saying that I've since got confirmation that this
is a x86 PC BIOS feature, that we currently in AW (simply because of
oversight) do not support.
(I even heard that you can input CTRL-C and NULL using ALT-3 and ALT-257
respectively!)
Paul Rohr wrote:
> At 10:43 PM 4/17/01 +0200, Mike Nordell wrote:
>>
> >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)
Ehh, wouldn't that long bar next to your thumbs do the trick? ;->
But seriously, since this apparently is a BIOS matter we should support it.
Since the BIOS can't spell Unicode, much less emit it, I think my point of
leaving this to either the IME or any other application you might have
running to insert these characters should handle it.
Perhaps this even is an issue for some X input managers?
But maybe, just maybe, we could add _something_ as user-defined
key-bindings?
> Failing that, we should (eventually) do one or both of the following:
>
> - extend the symbol dialog to input all Unicode symbols available
A noble goal, but probably quite a task. One reasonably good implementation
I've seen of this is Windows 2000 charmap.exe. It also displays a list of
the Unicode sub-ranges (contained in the font) upon request. Now that's
good, but I wouldn't say it's a 1.0 feature. More like 2.3.
> - create explicit shortcuts for common punctuation characters
I think this is where we agree on this.
> 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.
What about starting a hardware company that manufacture a hex numeric
keypad?
- What? The mouse mouse to the right of the keyboard would be in its way?
You haven't switched to retina scanners yet???
;-)
/Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Apr 26 2001 - 15:13:23 CDT