Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84 +SENDMAIL+2.11; site dcl-cs.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!bonnie!akgua!gatech!seismo!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!craig 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.