Dead and Compose keys (was: Re: Romanized Singhala got great reception in Sri Lanka)

[Michael Everson]

On 16 Mar 2014, at 23:47, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:

> Jean-François Colson <jf at colson dot eu> wrote:
> 
>> The idea here was “that characters not on an ordinary QWERTY keyboard could be entered _using_an_ordinary_QWERTY_keyboard._” Are there any dead keys on an _ordinary_ (i.e. not one using an international(ized) driver) QWERTY keyboard?
> 
> Not on the standard vanilla U.S. keyboard. It has to be provided by the OS, via a driver, just as Compose key support has to be provided by the OS.

Please distinguish between “keyboard” which is a piece of hardware and “keyboard layout” which is a software input method. 

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/