Re: Re: Emulation of Alt+Numpad+Digits behavior

Alan Coopersmith wrote on 2004-08-04 15:00 UTC:
> > What I am trying to do is to emulate the 
> > MS-Windows behaviour which lets one enter arbitrary characters by using 
> > the Alt-Key while entering the character code on the numerical keypad.

The MS-Windows behaviour is somewhat cumbersome for several reasons:

  - It uses decimal numbers, whereas many people seem to be far more
    familiar with hexadecimal numbers of well-known non-ASCII Unicode
    characters (20AC is the EURO, 2018/2018 are the left/right single
    quotation mark, 2013/2014 are en/em dash, 2212 is the minus sign, etc.),
    probably because the Unicode standard prints only the hex codes.

  - It requires two hands to be used simultaneously.

  - It requires the entry of a redundant leading zero, to avoid
    the MS-DOS CP437 backwards compatibility mode.

There is a much neater alternative standardized in

  ISO/IEC 14755 - Input methods to enter characters from
  the repertoire of ISO/IEC 10646 with a keyboard or other input devices
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ISO-14755.pdf

which fixes all these problems.

If you do something in this area, please implement the ISO 14755 hex
input method, and not the old MS-Windows one. (Or implement both
together, if you really need MS-Windows compatibility here. They don't
interfere with each other, because the ISO 14755 technique uses
Ctrl-Shift to activate the hex-entry mode, while MS-Windows uses Alt.)

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__