Re: console input

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Bruno Haible wrote on 1999-08-30 17:32 UTC:
> Markus Kuhn writes:
> > E.g., think not only about
> > combining characters, but also about Arabic final forms that become
> > middle forms if you add another character without a space.
> 
> That's not an output issue, it's an input method issue. Because the
> final/non-final forms (for Hebrew) or final/initial/medial/isolated forms
> (for Arabic) are different Unicode code points.

I think it is an output issue, because the Arabic presentation forms for
final/initial/medial are not supposed to be used in plain text. These
code points exist primarily to be used internally in rendering
pipelines. It was my understanding, that they are not supposed to come
out of keyboard drivers.

> 2. And/or introduce
>    a magic key (Meta-U or something) which permits to type hexadecimal
>    Unicode values.

On this topic, please read also

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ISO-14755.pdf

which specifies several minimally required fallback input methods,
including Ctrl-Shift plus hex digits. (Please do not publish a link to
the above document, as it is only temporarily publicly available.)

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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