Re: Unit Scaling Prefixes: (was Birthday Wish)

[Peter Schoch <pschoch@NAC.NET>]

OK,

You type in a letter from your keyboard, and its string of 1's and 0's
goes through the Op. Sys. and is interpreted.  If you change your
default font on your machine, you MAY be able to actually type in any
alphabet available on the machine.  That is the key here -- the font
style must be available and displayable on the machine.

Have you seen a Chinese computer with a pseudo-Chinese keyboard?  The
thing is a mess, it is complicated, and it doesn't work very well.

You will also note that the Symbol font doesn't support all of the
symbols one may need.  In some implementations it is also NOT TrueType,
which leands to a totally diferent set of problems.

So, you would need a tremendously huge keyboard, all computers to be
equipped with all the possible permutations of the font you require, and
all platforms to support the keyboard and the font styles.

Oh, by the way, I am new to the list.  My name is Peter Schoch and I
teach Physics, Computer Information Systems, Astronomy, and Differential
Equations at Sussex County Community College in Newton NJ.

paul o johnson wrote:
> Now wait a minute, Phil. All applications by all developers interpret the A key as
> the Roman letter A in English fonts and as the Greek letter alpha in Symbol font,
> do they not? I routinely use only three word processing applications, but this is
> true in all three of them: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, and Adobe
> Pagemaker. When I want a sigma, I type S, select it and change it to Symbol font,
> and I get a sigma. To my knowledge, all applications use the same relationship
> between English and Greek letters.
>
> But even if they didn't, all applications would necessarily interpret a separate
> alpha key as alpha, etc.
>
> What am I missing?
>
> poj
>
> Phil Parker wrote:
>
> > > Date:    Mon, 12 Apr 1999 09:00:14 -0500
> > > From:    paul o johnson <pojhome@FLASH.NET>
> > >
> > > Why doesn't someone invent a scientific keyboard having separate keys for the
> > > more common Greek letters?
> > Because it wouldn't help; how Greek letters are represented internally varies
> > from one application to another -- there's no standard.  If there were, such
> > a keyboard would be quite helpful.
> >
> > ---------------------------------------------
> > Phil Parker        pparker@twsuvm.uc.twsu.edu
> > Random quote for this second:
> >   Optimization hinders evolution.