[XeTeX] Transliteration mapping for Greek ?

[Barry MacKichan]

I should have read the full thread before responding...

The keyboard in the '80s was in the range of $100, an order of magnitude
less that the one at the end of this link. But I'm sure it takes a lot
of capital to get the quantities high enough to bring the price down.

--Barry

> You mean something like this: 
> http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/ ?
--Barry

Barry MacKichan wrote:
> 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!
>>
>>   
>>     
>
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-- 
Barry MacKichan
MacKichan Software Inc.
www.mackichan.com

-- Now even a smart kid can dream of being president.

For my public PGP key, search for 0x1F94BE80 on a PGP key server, such as http://keyserver.fabbione.net