Michael Everson wrote in reply to me (Richard):

>>Because if he doesn't design the glyph-based keyboard, someone else
>>will have to?
>
> I have already said that I don't see how you can design a "glyph-based"
> keyboard for 340 characters and 48-key hardware. Please, start sketching
> one out.

340 seems a lot - you're only proposing 284 characters for Vai in Unicode!
For fancy punctuation, I'm reminded of the situation in Thai - some of the
punctuation was long unavailable (still is in Windows XP), and you need the
key pad for normal digits. I suppose Thai laptop users have to switch to
the US keyboard for them - I suppose you could call that a shift(-lock)
state.

As to the design for Vai - still analysing the data. I want to know which
60 characters should have priority. As I don't have a font and I've never
implemented a keyboard mapping for direct input, it's largely a theoretical
exercise.

Richard.