[Lexicog] OT: Makah, keyboarding, and superscript-w (was: Query re keyboard re-mapping)

[Patrick Chew]

Mr. Barrett:

         I could've sworn that there's an encoded superscript <w> already
in the inventory... and lo and behold, I found it... it's to be found in
the "IPA Extensions" range, and the codepoint of the glyph you wanted is:
U+02B7.
         As for adding it onto a keyboard where it won't conflict with <w>
and <W>, it's easy enough to create a dead-key to mimic some mnemonic
device, i.e. <^>, and allow you to type a superscript-w.
         If you're using WinXP and would like a keyboard to handle
diacritics and special characters for Makah, please contact me directly and
let's talk in detail. (I've used MS's Keyboard Layout Creator quite a bit
now, so... I'm relatively used to it all...).

-Patrick

At 12:27 PM 9/17/2004, "Benjamin J  Barrett" <gogaku at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>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.




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