On Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:19:50 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 2:59 PM, Mark H Harris <harrismh...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> I personally think the answer is extended key maps triggered by meta >> keys shift ctrl opt alt command | which call up full alternate >> mappings of Greek|Latin|Math|symbols &c which can be chosen by >> mouse|pointing device. >> >> >> The mac calls these keyboard viewer, and character viewer. In that way >> the full unicode set can be available from a standard qwerty keyboard >> without modifying the hardware right away. > > I can get up a character map on any platform fairly easily, and if not, > I can always Google the name of the character I want and copy and paste > from fileformat.info or some other handy site. It's not that hard. But > if I want to say "copyright", it's still quicker for me to type nine > letters than to hunt down U+00A9 © to paste in somewhere.
I hear what you are saying, but that's not *necessarily* the case. Back when I was a Mac user, in the 1980s and 90s, *every* application accepted the same keyboard shortcuts for the entire Mac character set. Nearly all of the chars had trivially simple mnemonics, e.g Option-p for π. Now, I don't happen to remember what the mnemonic for © (it has been 20 years since I was regularly using a Mac), but I remember it used to be really easy. Easier to type Option-whatever and get a © than typing "copyright". So, if applications could standardise on a single interface for at least the common Unicode characters [er, common for who? English speakers? Japanese people? Arabs? Dutch?] then things would be more like 1984 on a Mac... -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
