Implementing SMP on a UTF-16 OS (was: Windows keyboard restrictions)

[Richard Wordingham]

On Mon, 10 Aug 2015 21:46:39 +0200 (CEST)
Marcel Schneider <charupdate at orange.fr> wrote:

> > Correct syntax would be: [...] 0xD835, 0xDCEA, 0xD835, 0xDCD0, [...]

> The problem with the commas here is that they don't only separate,
> they increment the modification number. The trailing surrogate must
> stay together with the leading one on the same shift state.

Non-BMP characters must be entered as 'ligatures'.

> By contrast, I've the good news to bring in that the test SMP
> keyboard layout works on Word 2013. When I press the key with U+1D4EA
> and U+1D4D0, the glyphs are directly inserted. So there's one less
> problem.

Curiously, I think it would work for my cuneiform keyboard with
Windows 2002 if I hadn't chosen the only Mesopotamian locale available
at the time, Iraqi Arabic.  I think I'm suffering from Word being too
clever by half - the font and keyboard kept changing when I claimed
the text was left-to-right. Perhaps Word 2002 has received better
patches. The first time I used it on Windows 7 some Thai was rendered
with black boxes.  I installed the extensions to handle OpenDocument,
and the problems went away.  If I change the font back to a Hittite
font I have, the text appears as it should.  I created the keyboard
for doing Babylonian maths, so I don't think a Turkish locale would
have been appropriate, despite my using a Hittite font.  It would
probably work better, though.

Richard.