Special Characters

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 12:41 +0930, Tim wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 14:50 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > IMHO this is the only reasonable way to do accented characters. The
> > "compose-key" combos are hopeless for people who actually use accents
> > continually, as I do in Spanish. The other option (using a special
> > language keyboard) can be even worse. Imagine a keyboard with no
> > visible @, |, {, #, \ etc. Monolingual programmers need to aware that
> > accents aren't an optional extra but something that if you need them
> > you need them all the time and in every context (outside actual
> > programming for the most part). 
> 
> I'm of the opposite persuasion.  I find it damn handy that ' characters,
> for instance, are simply typed, and don't require special typing.  But
> with the dead key approach, I find that simply typing plain English
> becomes the nightmare that users requiring what's foreign (to us) have
> had to put up with.  There's a lot of ordinary punctuation that, then,
> becomes a two key sequence.

Alternatively you can switch keyboard layouts, using the standard or
international one most of the time and switching to the other one when
required. However I find I just hit '+space automatically when I want
the apostrophe. De gustibus non est disputandum.

> Whereas it's more convenient, for me, to have to do special typing for
> the few unusual characters I need, and common punctuation is a single
> key, or perhaps with the shift key.  Ala using the compose method.

The operative word here being "few". My point is that for those of us
living in non-English speaking countries the need is not at all
occasional, it's constant.

> Both methods suck.
> 
> Ever more, the need for the standard QWERTY keyboard (and its ilk) to be
> abandoned has increased.  It's inadequate for anything more than primary
> school beginner's English.  Standard punctuation and programming
> characters need to be one-key-press events, and common typography
> characters need to be included as standard keys (e.g. the various dashes
> that people bodge up with double minus-hyphens, the inability to easily
> type non-breaking spaces and dashes).  They're a part of the written
> language.  Character permutations (e.g. the "a" with all the different
> accents it might use) needs to be better handled, without you needing to
> know all sorts of tricks that aren't even hinted about by the keyboard
> legends.  Not to mention how useless it is for languages with far more
> than 26 letters.

Straying into typesetting territory here. Type conventions evolved over
centuries to make text readable and fairly compact on the printed page,
but only pros can really handle them properly.

Slightly OT (or maybe not): a recent NY Times article reported on the
rapid death of handwriting skills as people increasingly use various
sorts of keyboards. Even those who still write by hand tend to use block
letters more often than not. My personal bugbear is those who post
messages to mailing lists without having managed to work out what the
Shift key is for, which is only slightly better than the ones who's Caps
Lock is apparently stuck at ON. But I digress ...

poc