Re: A Font for Pictographs

On Sun, 14 Dec 2008 02:25:53 -0800, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

>Oh, this doesn't have to do with sharing documents--THAT is
>impossible (or, at least, using the filetype that one uses in creating
>the document).  This is just for personal use on the Mac.
But that's exactly what keyboard layouts are for -- you know, the things
that in OS X you can select from in the Input Menu tab of International
System Preferences.  A keyboard layout can change the binding of any key
combination arbitrarily; there is no God-given mapping from combinations of
keys you press to a Unicode entity, and changing the mapping is the
capital-R Right way to do it in today's technology, not messing with the
font.  So you could, for instance, make one (with Ukelele, per JF Colson)
that maps every keystroke to the value of the character it belongs to in
DaveIPA, and then use it with any Unicode font you desire.

Someone round here once made a keylayout for X-SAMPA.  But it didn't work
for me, for whatever reason; and now I can't even Google it up again.

Alex

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