At 20:36 +0100 2005-08-24, Richard Wordingham wrote:

>340 seems a lot - you're only proposing 284 characters for Vai in Unicode!

I have already said, add ten digits, 30 ASCII punctuations, quotation
marks and dashes, the euro sign, and maybe some other minor things,
like the degree sign and the pilcrow. It's between 330-340.

>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.

You don't have to switch in my QWERTY-based keyboard.

>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.

You could draw it out on paper to define the design parameters. If it
were good, or possible, to meet the brief this way, I would implement
it. I did implement both syllabic and QWERTY layouts for Cherokee and
Inuktitut. Though those need fewer characters.
--
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com