[Lexicog] RE: Query re keyboard re-mapping

[Benjamin J Barrett]

This is fairly off-topic, but it seems I'm not the only one on this list
frustrated with this.

I decided that Rudy's forwarded solution is probably the only recourse
for getting superscripts. What would be nice is to have a keyboard ready
to go, though. With this work-around, the keyboard only "works" in
Microsoft Word.

I suppose that's only natural, though, since superscripting is a
formatting issue. I went to the Unicode page and they have a FAQ telling
people not to request modified letters. They have a variety of
diacritics that have a built-in backspace so they appear above the
letter typed after them.

That's as far as I have pursued this issue, but this means that it's
impossible to type in Makah in a Weblog or any other of a variety of
interfaces because it requires a superscript "w". Yes, you can add HTML
tags in an HTML-compliant interface, so I guess you can program a
keyboard to handle that, but then two "w" keys are needed, one for each
interface, but that really just avoids the issue that Unicode doesn't
directly support language X that requires superscripts.

My thought is to approach the Unicode committee with the problem, but I
would like to present the issue in a way that is informed with their
issues and that makes the case clear.

To me, the issue seems clear: If Unicode does not have a superscripted
"w" as a character, there is no way for me to write Makah in e-mail,
Excel, Yahoo!Chat or most of the other software. If Unicode does have
it, users need only get an updated version of the Unicode font for their
system to be able to display it correctly. The downside of this is
perhaps a need to greatly expand the number of Unicode characters to
support all the languages with such issues, but given the myriads of
Chinese characters already included, that doesn't seem like THAT big of
a deal.

The other solution is to provide a behind-the-scenes
superscripting-and-letter-shrinking code that makes any letter smaller
in size and superscripted. I don't think that is practical, though, due
to the way computers work.

With Longhorns (Windows 2006) well in the works, it might be too late,
but it seems this is a critical issue for continuing the widening
compatability of Microsoft's software with various languages. Again, I
would like to make a strong case to Microsoft. Along with this is the
need to change the two-letter language abbreviations used in HTML and
Microsoft's language bars to a three-letter abbreviation such as the
Ethnologue uses. With only two letters, we'll run out of possible
languages after 625 languages.

Does anyone have experience in approaching these bodies?

Benjamin Barrett
Baking the World a Better Place (with the famous dog Pasco)
www.hiroki.us

-----Original Message-----
From: Rudolph C Troike [mailto:rtroike at u.arizona.edu]

When Benjamin Barrett mentioned that he was having trouble getting
superscripts in MS Word, I recalled my own frustration at doing this and
e-mailed a friend who works at Microsoft about the question, as well as
keyboard re-mapping for other purposes. I am forwarding part of his
response below.

      Rudy


---------- Forwarded message ----------
There is in fact a shortcut key in Word for superscripting. Select the
character you want to superscript, and then press: Ctrl-Shift-+

You can find the shortcut key for any Word command (or assign one of
your own) in the following way:

   1. Go to Tools and select Customize
   2. Click Keyboard...
   3. Select the category the command belongs to
      in the Categories list, and then select the
      command name in the Commands list.
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