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From: craig@dcl-cs.UUCP (Craig Wylie)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: What do we REALLY want? (really keyboard design)
Message-ID: <763@dcl-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-Nov-85 09:21:50 EST
Article-I.D.: dcl-cs.763
Posted: Wed Nov  6 09:21:50 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Nov-85 03:59:46 EST
References: <723@inset.UUCP> <960@erix.UUCP> <1569@hammer.UUCP> <6066@utzoo.UUCP> <1581@hammer.UUCP> <18@diku.UUCP> <1612@hammer.UUCP>
Reply-To: craig@dcl-cs.UUCP (Craig Wylie)
Followup-To: net.lang, net.internat
Distribution: net
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University.
Lines: 28
Keywords: Keyboard design, character sets

In article <18@diku.UUCP> kimcm@diku.UUCP (Kim Christian Madsen) writes:

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

The main problem here is obviously one of size (Awards for statement
of the bleeding obvious need not be presented). People seem to want a keyboard
that will not only display the required characters on the tops of the keys
but they also want it general enough to handle n different character sets. 
Note that as well as additional characters on a French keyboard
compared to a British one, even some of the standard characters are in 
different places.

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. OK. Implant a matrix of LCD on top of each key and display the
character that it represents. If a large enough matrix was available then
surely most charaters could be displayed. If a set contains more characters
than available keys then one key changes between 'pages' of characters. This
needs more thought as a language with 5000 charactes would have far too many
'pages' to be useful, but heuristics could probably be devised to help.

The internal representation  of character sets is a problem to be resolved at
another time (stay tuned).



			Craig.