Typing Unicode

[Graham Samuel]

Hi all

I'm not surprised that I didn't get a reply to my question below, apart from maybe Richmond: after all, if he has people typing Sanskrit, they must have some kind of keyboard or other interface device to do it. Tell us, what is it?

At the moment, since my own required set of Unicode-only (non-normal keyboard) characters is quite limited, I'm going for a little window (stack) with a grid of characters that can be picked by the mouse (or if there is a mobile version, your finger). This is fine I reckon up to a grid of say 4 x 4 characters, which is in fact more than I currently need, and which would be entirely cross-platform since the glyphs can be represented as images and don't have to be capable of being displayed natively. Pretty much like a simplified colour picker. But it wouldn't do for a complete alphabet in a foreign language - I guess that just has to be a soft keyboard, no? Incidentally, if Unicode 'just works', what actually is the capability of say Mavericks and Windows 8 of displaying 'specialised' glyphs (like maths and logic symbols) or for that matter, Sanskrit? Anyone know?

Graham

> I'm not sure if this is OT or not. I'm about to offer users of a desktop app (Mac and Windows) the ability to input some mathematical symbols, along with ordinary alphanumeric text. Clearly these symbols will be processed by the program as Unicode characters, since soon we will have "Unicode just works" for real. But my users are going to want to type these characters easily, using a conventional keyboard, which has very few such symbols, or - what? A soft keyboard, as on a touchscreen device (I'm using one to write this message on my iPad)? Or a dropdown list? Or some kind of multikey processing routine? Or something else? And how cross-platform is it possible to get?
> 
> Has anyone else worked on this problem and if so, what was the most ergonomic solution?
> 
> TIA
> 
> Graham