req@warwick.UUCP (Russell Quin) (11/11/85)
[...] >What we need is a re-configurable keyboard. Of usable size but with all >needed charaters displayed, as they appear on the screen, on the tops >of the keys. [ suggests using LCDs ] [...] >If a set contains more characters than available keys then one key changes >between 'pages' of characters. I have enough problems coping with modes in editors (at lot of software seems to have at least two modes where keys typed are interpreted differently), without having to worry about what mode the *keyboard* is in as well! This sort of information must be duplicated on the screen if it is to be useful at all. In any event, I don't look at both screen and keyboard when typing. Usually just the screen, in fact, unless the terminal is unfamiliar to me (like this one). Another problem -- look at the buttons on your keyboard. Are they clean? Not only do fingers conceal the keytops, but dirt wouldn't help either, as well as the difficulty of getting an adequate connection to the tiny display as it moves up & down. There seem to be several other issues involved. 1 people using differnt alphabets need different sets of characters available. A French keyboard without a cedilla is as useful as a Finnish one with a cedilla but no umlaut. 2 portability -- it isn't helpful if a program uses the grave accent (eg. Bourne Shell) and this happens to print as a Pound Sterling symbol on your device. So it would be good if the same characters always printed in the same way. 3 Big alphabets -- there are already too many charcters to fit onto a sane keyboard, but a big problem comes when there are *many* characters. One possible solution here that has already been mentioned involves using multiple-character names for symbols and having a routine to turn this into/out of an internal representation. The characters would be stored in a homogenous way, so grep-like tools would work. This would help for maths symbols, too. Which leads up to 4 Mixed alphabets: what does grep '[a-deltaC-OMEGA]' file mean? What about grep '[alpha-epsilon ALPHA-EPSILON aleph yod Man-In-House-With-Dog]'? It seems sensible not to define the meaning of ranges of mixed alphabets (eg. [aleph-delta]), so a character's alphabet would have to be obvious from the internal representation. By the time we get this far, we seem to be moving away from a good-old-ASCII- computer-system and towards a cross between a graphics machine and a typesetter! Since presumably not all machines would ever have access to all alphabets, there are huge portability problems. Has anyone built a machine that goes even partway towards addresing these areas? TeX or Troff in the tty driver... [0.5 :-)] Perhaps we would do better to try not to address the huge oriental alphabets in this way at all -- the benefits don't seem wothwhile. >The internal representation of character sets is a problem to be resolved at >another time (stay tuned). > Craig. I feel that the representation is important. A standard will not be useful if it can't be implemented. - Russell -- ... mcvax!ukc!warwick!req (req@warwick.UUCP) ... mcvax!ukc!warwick!frplist (frplist@warwick.UUCP) friend: someone one seems to be able to tolerate at the moment
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (11/19/85)
> ...I have enough problems coping with modes in editors ... > without having to worry about what mode the *keyboard* is in as well! > This sort of information must be duplicated on the screen if it is to be > useful at all... Another problem -- look at the buttons on your keyboard. > Are they clean? Not only do fingers conceal the keytops, but dirt wouldn't > help either, as well as the difficulty of getting an adequate connection to the > tiny display as it moves up & down. Actually, these problems can be solved by a sneaky trick. You put an angled glass plate over the keyboard, in your line of sight to it but high enough that it does not obstruct hand access. Then you put a monitor in the right place so that the image of the monitor face seen in the glass is superimposed on the keyboard. Presto: keytop displays that are dirt-proof and can be seen *through* your fingers. No tricky connection problems either. It's been tried, and it works pretty well. It doesn't solve the problem of wanting to touch-type, though. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry