[XeTeX] Transliteration mapping for Greek ?

[Barry MacKichan]

I can add a short historical note to this from the late '80's.

There was a keyboard with small LCD screens on its keys, developed by a
small German company. Software could download small (5x8 ??) bitmaps to
the keys. At the time we had developed T3, a word processor that allowed
the use of pretty arbitrary 256 character fonts and almost unlimited
levels of subscripts and superscripts. The primary market was
mathematicians, but some people used the font flexibility for typing in
other languages. A number of math papers in Russian were written with
T3. It included a font editor that allowed you to create your own
characters (different resolutions for the screen and various printers --
remember, this was in the DOS days). The keyboard was a great fit with
our software, and so we supported the keyboard and the company served as
a distributor of our software.

Unfortunately, the investors in the keyboard company got nervous and
pulled the plug in April 1987, the day that IBM announced it PS2. I
never understood their logic, but the company went bankrupt owing us a
lot of money.

I think it would be reasonable to build such a keyboard today -- the
cost of LCD screens must be pretty low now, but there are drawbacks:
Touch typing is no easier with such a keyboard since your fingers cover
the key caps, and you are competing with $10 keyboards, and most people
won't want to carry one around to use with their laptop.

--Barry MacKichan
>> It would be far better for me to be able to directly 
>> enter multilingual text into our files.
>>     
>
> Absolutely.  I hope there will come a keyboard
> which is actually a touch screen which can not
> only change the labels on the 'keys' according
> to the currently selected keyboard layout but
> also change the layout of the 'keys' themselves
> according to the task at hand. (Speaking as
> someone who has both a Dvorak keyboard which I
> use and a QWERTY keyboard which my wife uses
> attached to the home computer, and recently
> bought a 'special World of Warcraft keyboard'
> as au urgently requested present for my son! :-)
> Not so long ago there was some talk about a
> keyboard where each key had a small LCD screen,
> but speaking ATM a touchscreen 'keyboard'
> seems better!
>
>