0027, 02BC, 2019, or a new character?

Marcel Schneider via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Sun Jan 28 01:12:45 CST 2018


On Sun, 28 Jan 2018 05:02:47 +0000, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 27 Jan 2018 22:54:57 +0100 (CET)
> Marcel Schneider via Unicode  wrote:
> 
> > The US-Intl is so weird “you canʼt just leave it on all the time” as
> > reported in:
> > 
> > http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML017/0558.html
> 
> I did (except when I was using a totally different writing system).
> One just has to remember that those punctuation marks need two key
> strokes, the first being the space key. Mark Davis's problem seems to
> be that he was using an Apple half the time.

Indeed, Appleʼs US-extended has lots of dead keys on Option level, so that 
Base level ASCII symbols are left alone. Some of these are hijacked on 
Windowsʼ US-international for five deadkeys only (likewise, French hijacks two), 
to disrupt UX wrt macOS, impacting those using both.

And developers donʼt like to remember hitting space before a vowel to get 
the (single/double/reverse) quote, or tilde or caret. On any layout, such a 
complication is inacceptable to most coders.

But US-Intl isnʼt the only case. The Canadian Standard layout too is cheered 
on Apple and disliked on Windows, obviously because beyond the first two 
levels, there are many many differences. That cannot really be a matter of 
conformance to the CAN specs, as the Windows implementation leaves out 
the '⅛' character, beside of messing up the group modifier.

We can only hope that now, CLDR is thoroughly re-engineering the way 
international or otherwise extended keyboards are mapped.

Regards,

Marcel



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