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From: kimcm@diku.UUCP (Kim Christian Madsen)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: What do we REALLY want?
Message-ID: <18@diku.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 27-Oct-85 23:33:32 EST
Article-I.D.: diku.18
Posted: Sun Oct 27 23:33:32 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Oct-85 06:50:51 EST
References: <723@inset.UUCP> <960@erix.UUCP> <1569@hammer.UUCP> <6066@utzoo.UUCP> <1581@hammer.UUCP>
Reply-To: kimcm@diku.UUCP (Kim Christian Madsen)
Organization: DIKU, U of Copenhagen, DK
Lines: 44

In article <1581@hammer.UUCP> tekecs!doghouse.TEK!snoopy writes:
>Problem is, that changing the standard character set is going to be
>a really major change.  In addition to changing software, there's
>all those terminals that need to change.

Can you imagine a keyboard with 65535 different characters available,
*WOUW* (-; 

Well, I work with keyboard layouts with app. 200 different visible 
characters available, by pressing ctrl, alt and certain dead keys
(like accent keys) to obtain the many characters within a sensible
keyboardsize. The major obstacle to bypass is not the terminals (you
can just build the character proms big enough!) but the keyboards.
If you have all the fancy characters at hand, you bet some will want
to use them. Having each key on the keyboard to represent more than
4 different characters is too frustrating (I have enough trouble
finding the correct character with only *FOUR* different characters
for each key!!!) And I would certainly not be too satisfied with a
keyboard which fills all of my desk

Yes, there certainly is a need for a International Standard of
lettering, I would like to be able to use the correct way of adressing
a person in another country with another alphabeth, whether its
japanese, french, danish or whatever. But I see no easy way of doing
this (if the human interface is going to be friendly).

Maybe we shall have to wait for the computer which understands human
speech, and then translates the spoken word into the proper characters!

However some advance is still possible, if we restrict the characters
to those build upon the LATIN characters (ABCDE...etc) we can do it
with easy to remember keys, like Olivetti has done with their M24,
where you can hit the (dead) key ' and then an e and get an e with an
accent aigu. This can be done with all the accents and the like 
( ' ` ^ " ~ u v o ) and thereby increase the number of characters a
great deal! We might be able to create a full European characterset
including the characters used in Eastern Europe.

However to use LATIN, japanese, chinese, arabic, hebraian and other
characters types simultaneously on the same keyboard isn't going to
work well.

						Kim Chr. Madsen
						kimcm@diku.uucp