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Date:      10 Apr 2000 22:30:41 +0200
From:      naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber)
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: dutch keyboard map (+sort note)
Message-ID:  <8ctdlh$in7$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de>
References:  <38F0C306.41C67EA6@xs4all.nl> <200004092033.WAA73151@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de> <20000410012143.A95967@keltia.freenix.fr>

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Ollivier Robert <roberto@keltia.freenix.fr> wrote:

> > > As there isn´t a dutch keymap for syscons,
> >               ^
> > That's an acute accent (the same diacritic as in 'é'), not an
> > apostrophe.
> 
> In 8859-1 yes but not in 8859-15 (aka Latin9)...

Well, the original message was in Latin 1. You re-interpretating
it as Latin 9 is not fair.

> In 8859-15 (which is 8859-1 with 8 different characters including
> the Euro symbol >¤< and the '½/¼' aka oe/OE pair), the acute accent
> is a slovac letter (I think), a 'Z' with a reversed circumflex
> (like a small 'v').

As a modified Latin 1, Latin 9 doesn't cover Slovak. Besides, that
would require a few more characters. The S and Z caron that were
added are supposedly required for Finnish.

> That's why this character should have never been used in place of an
> apostrophe but I've seen many germans using it, even those outside
> Windows... I've always wondered why.

Apparently the typical German keyboard has both an apostrophe and
an acute. The latter is intended as a deadkey, but the use of
deadkeys doesn't seem to be universal, for many people the acute
seems to be located more conveniently, from the glyph the difference
is hardly obvious, and depending on the font users may consider
the acute in fact to have the more desirable shape.

And of course trying to explain to most users the difference between
character, glyph, code point, and encoding is entirely futile. "But
I don't care, I only want to have"--points--"this one."

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                  naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de



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