Re: Tinkerfont - Any con-alphabet you want it to be

On Tuesday, February 22, 2005 10:33 PM, Gary Shannon wrote:

> Now it seems like a real waste to have to use two or
> three letters to represent one character of the
> alphabet, however, using these bits and pieces they
> could be combined in many new and original ways making
> it possible to print literally tens of thousands of
> unique symbols with only one font.
This is how Chinese keyboards work.  Obviously you can't have one key for
each of thousands of characters.  The solution is to provide a keystroke
for each radical in the written language.  Type the radicals in a
predetermined order and the computer software will display the
corresponding character.  I think that character boundaries are inferred by
the software.  I've never used such a keyboard but it sounds like a good
solution.

For an alphabetic language, the code space is fairly small and a 1:1
mapping of characters to keys suffices... It might be useful to have a
"tion" key, or an "ing" key... or a "reinterpret_cast<" key, damn those
c++98ers and their long long keyword names.  Then again, I don't program
c++ anymore so maybe I wouldn't want one on my keyboard.

-Noktakanto

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