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On 5/4/2010 1:11 AM, Wilfred van Rooijen wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:144148.76837.qm@web65504.mail.ac4.yahoo.com"
type="cite">
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valign="top">Hi all,<br>
<br>
This seems to be precisely the issue. Xetex can read and understand all
unicode characters, but at this time, the only way to communicate with
the computer is through the keyboard and the mouse. Thus, there will
always be issues with "special characters". I don't know if it exists,
and if not it may be interesting to develop, but a keyboard with LCD
keys would be nice.</td>
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<br>
<a href="http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/">http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/</a><br>
<br>
It exists, it's not the most ergonomical, and it's a bit pricy. But my
biggest problem with it is that it's a good idea but using the wrong
technology: you don't want LEDs, you want "only require power when you
set them" keyfaces, so E-ink would be infinitely preferable (but there
are no E-ink keyboards =). Then you also know what they keyboard can do
when you turn off the power, or the system goes on standby, because the
faces don't disappear.<br>
<br>
In the mean time, for infrequent characters my personal stance is to
just use a character selector program such as Babelmap on windows (I
forget the name on the Mac, it's quite a nice utility). For frequent
characters, at least in windows and I assume in other OSses as well,
you just install an extra kayboard mapping for the language in which
the characters are frequent, and alt-shift cycle your way to that
language. For instance, to get accented Dutch characters in windows,
you'd add Dutch as keyboard mapping, and typing "e will produce ë. A
friend showed me this can easily de done in Ubuntu as well, so I
presume all the *nix flavours including MacOS allow for this.<br>
<br>
- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans<br>
nihongoresources.com<br>
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