Windows keyboard restrictions

[Doug Ewell]

Now that I know Andrew is the PM for MSKLC ¹, and can answer Marcel's 
questions (publicly or privately) with authority, I'll duck out of this 
thread.

¹ I'm glad to hear that there is such a person. I was afraid the project 
had been left to die.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO ����


From: Marcel Schneider
Sent: Saturday, August 8, 2015 6:05
To: Andrew Glass (WINDOWS)
Cc: Doug Ewell ; Unicode Mailing List
Subject: RE: Windows keyboard restrictions


On 08 Aug 2015, at 02:19, Andrew Glass (WINDOWS) 
<Andrew.Glass at microsoft.com> wrote:

> Sorry to be late to this thread. I'm the Program Manager responsible 
> for MSKLC at this time. As far as the history here, I can only 
> reiterate Michael's point that making significant changes to 
> user32.dll faces significant, perhaps insurmountable headwinds. There 
> would have to be compelling reasons to make any kind of changes here. 
> If you have specific feedback for Microsoft on this issue, please 
> follow up with me off line.

Thank you.

While *one* dimension of this thread is to get minor changes performed 
in order to asset ligatures support for 16 characters uniformly in 
Windows keyboard drivers, the main concern at the actual point of the 
thread is to know something about the actual support as well as at the 
time of MSKLC:

1. On Windows, up to how many characters may be inserted with one single 
key stroke:
1.1. At the time of MSKLC 1.0?
1.2. When MSKLC was updated from version 1.3 to 1.4?
1.3. At the time of Windows Seven, that is 6.1, Build 7601 (SP1)?
1.4. Today, that is on Windows 10?

It is supposed that a keyboard driver is used in whose source a ligature 
table is defined for whatever number of characters (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ... 
16, ... 32, ... 60, ... 100, ...).

2. Supposed that Windows supported more than four characters per 
ligature:
2.1. Why has the MSKLC been limited to four characters per ligature?
2.2. Who or what body made the demand of the limitation to four 
characters?
2.3. Why does the MSKLC Help state (Glossary - Ligature) that the 
maximum number supported by Windows is four characters?
2.4. How Microsoft dealt with user demands for support of longer 
ligatures?

Best regards,

Marcel Schneider