Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:
> > suzmccarth wrote:
> > >
> > > (Dead keys IMO
> > > are very non-intuitive and should only be used for a very limited
> > > number of features in any script, if at all.)
>
> > I've had the impression that you're old enough to remember
> typewriters.
> > Didn't you ever have to put accents on letters? Don't you remember
> the
> > annoyance of backspacing?
>
> > For those of you who are younger than typewriters, a "dead key"
> was one
> > that didn't move the carriage but printed an accent above/below
> where
> > you were about to type a letter.
>
> I think Suzanne would welcome that sort of dead key on a computer.
> The dead keys I am familiar with - e.g. the dead keys in the United
> States Internation 'keyboard' in Windows - do nothing until the
> second character is typed. Can such 'keyboards' be modified to
> display something while waiting for the second key press?
>
> We have another case of conflicting terminology here. On a Thai
> (also Tamil?) keyboard, the keys for the superscript and subscript
> vowels are what Peter Daniels would call 'dead keys', but they are
> not 'dead keys' in the sense of computer keyboard technology!

Ecological Linguistics (Lloyd Anderson)'s fonts use two different kinds
of "dead key." The first, which imitates the typewriter's, is simply a
zero-width character, and any number of them can be put into any font,
using Fontographer or whatever you make fonts in.

The other is done within the software keyboard and is the same process
the standard Mac uses for acute, grave, etc.: a succession of two keys
(the first doesn't even have to have Option along with it) after which a
glyph appears. Back when I needed to know about such things, they were
done within ResEdit, a free utility but you had to buy the manual that
told you (in that terse, uninterpretable style that computer engineers
love so much) how to use it.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...