On 22/05/14 21:00, Alejandro Tejada wrote:
Richmond Mathewson-2 wrote
I am afraid you have a misreading of my input method.
My input method involves a huge amount of post-processing after
an end-user presses a key on their keyboard: all that code would have
to be altered prior to it working properly with LC 7.
Now I understand. Then, OS input methods are incomplete for
some very specific languages.
Thanks for explaining this.
Al
OS input methods normally go for the lowest common denominator.
For instance, there is no keyboard layout that I am aware of on any
operating system for
Scots; so one is forced to use an English keyboard layout, at which
point one cannot find
the letter 'Ȝ' (Hex - 21C) or 'ȝ' (Hex - 21D), which when one wants to
write 'minȝan' is,
indeed minȝan!
The same goes for dead languages for the very simple fact that
historically writing systems have
simplified:
Sanskrit using the Devanagari script was a whole load more complicated
than Hindi with the same,
and Vedic (which predated Sanskrit) was even more difficult.
Old Church Slavonic using the Cyrillic script used an
alphabet-cum-abugida with about 47 letters
in 3 forms (Capitals, lower-case and combining) while modern Slavic
languages that use Cyrillic
writing systems use far less and have stopped using combining characters
and the 30-odd
diacritical marks.
Unicode is a brave, and very brave, attempt to be as universal as is
realistically possible. However
'realistically' possible doesn't mean making space for the set of
characters used by the Mittani
people who lived in what is now Turkey about 4000 years ago, is
currently understood by 12 professors
and consists of a library of 40 pages.
Now above-and-beyond the Unicode system: which is, after all, from the
end user's point of view, nothing more than an ASCII system on steroids
(one character for one magic number), there is
how those symbols are combined.
Many ancient languages were not written in a way we would call LTR or
RTL, or even, like modern Chinese can be, from top-to-bottom, but in
ways which can only, frankly, be termed "bl**dy
awkward". There was, also, very little of what we understand by
standardisation; both in terms
of what we call spelling, and in the way things were written.
-----------------------------------
Now; if one wants to use Unicode for setting one's menu bar in Modern
Chinese, Arabic,
Russian and so forth, there is really very little trouble [well, Ha, Ha,
until one remembers that
most Arabic letters come in 3-4 varaint forms: start-of-word,
middle-of-word, end-of-word and
standalone]. However, dead languages are "something else".
To expect Livecode to just "DO" dead languages is a completely
unrealistic expectation. That
is not RunRev's job [right now it seems to be mine]; their job is to
provide a computer coding
platform, and make it capable of providing interfaces that function in
modern languages.
------------------------------------
The reason why operating systems ONLY provide keyboard layouts for
living languages is because,
most of the time, all they have to do is map glyphs to the keys on our
keyboard: they don't have to
contains thousands of twiddly rules for combining those glyphs with 101
exceptions. The sheer time
and specialist knowledge required to produce a keyboard layout that did,
say, Sanskrit, authentically
[not forgetting, of course that Unicode does not provide about 90% of
what is needed to represent
authentic Sanskrit] is not worth the financial return.
If you do not believe that: my Devawriter has taken me about 6 months
full-time (i.e. 4 years spare
time) to produce (this is of course one doesn't count the time I spent
teaching myself a working knowledge of the langauge and the mechanics of
the writing system). So far this effort has brought
me about $350 of which $100 was an extremely kind grant from the Saiva
Siddhanta Church in Hawaii.
---------------------------------
Cripes; that was a long flog.
But: I do know what I'm talking about, and it needs to be said so that
loads of people don't get
"all cheesed off" when they cannot use Livecode with their favourite
dead language straight out of the box.
Richmond.
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