How to best give access to special characters in a font

Andreas Stötzner

John Savard said:

… a new kind of keyboard that would have helped... but it was based on a principle (that of the Optimus Popularis) …

The Optimus goes in the right direction, half-way. How can a patent be the problem? For MS?? I don’t buy that. Did they reach out for an agreement with Lebedev? Does any body have insight?

And what are the other patents said to prevent a solution?

The organ cockpit, although devastatingly cool, is but a side-joke, of course.

Neither do the various character pickers and -paletts serve appropriately, as useful as they are, they are also just archaic makeshift solutions.

Where is the academic community, which would immensely profit from a 21st-century keyboard?

As Ray Larabie puts it: the means for a good solution are there for a rather long time already. – What is the  problem?

Peter Constable

Well, that is a reasonable metaphor for what typesetters used to deal with, is it not? 

Thomas Phinney

Patents also expire, so even if they were a block today, give it another 5-10 years....

The big problem is that the unit cost of doing this well (in my eyes, meaning with a proper keyboard and customizable-on-the-fly key caps) was prohibitive when Lebedev did it. Maybe it still is, depending on volume. The original keyboard cost what, $2000 USD? And the newer inexpensive version is $1300? That prices it into a super-specialty realm, for sure.

Ray Larabie

I don't think changing keyboards would be necessary to be able to access every Unicode character. Have you ever tried a custom keyboard? My cousin had one and it was fine until he had to use a laptop or a keyboard at a different computer. It has to work with stock keyboards or it'll never take off. It's an OS thing. Windows has an ancient system to input Unicode characters but it requires a number pad, something I haven't had on my keyboards for almost 2 decades. Word has it's own system. I wonder if most people do what I do and Google "copyright symbol" and copy/paste it from the results page.

Andreas Stötzner

Ray Larabie said:

… Google "copyright symbol" and copy/paste it from the results page.

This is hilarious. On a PC you’ve hardly another chance to do it. I usually go via a wiki page which gives me what I need, e.g. × or ⌀ characters, which are frequent travellers in technics/product settings. On the Mac the good old Zeichenpalette has become useless in its Emoji-streamlined concept and without a straight Unicode page selection mode. Only the glyph palette of InDesign is fun to work with, when you run a font with 5000 or more glyphs

Yes I do think that the present key-boards need to be changed, and I believe it is feasible at reasonable costs. $1000 for the end user is out of the universe, of course.

Customized keyboard drivers, as nice as they are for the happy few, they will never do for Joe Sixpack.

Robin Mientjes

@Andreas Stötzner You’ll be pleased to learn the following: the good old Zeichenpalette has a button top right that converts it back to the great old design. I have all my favourite Unicode pages in the sidebar, which is also still customisable.

Andreas Stötzner

Thank you for the hint, Robin, my assumption went exactly in that direction. When I hit the botton (top right), see what I get:

I fail to find any Unicode page option. The only thing I see is a few pre-selected menus.

Perhaps it is a matter of different OS versions? I run 10.10.5.

André G. Isaak

Andreas,

Try hitting the gear menu in the upper left-hand corner and then choose 'customize list' (or the German equivalent thereof).

Or switch to PopChar X which is far superior.

[Disclaimer: I have no connection whatsoever to Ergonis Software, makers of PopCharX]

Andreas Stötzner

Thank you André, that is the arcanum I was looking for. It lets you pick even Unicode tables. But with character depiction and insertion there are a few shortcomings, as a brief visit reveals. However, this isn’t going to be the future, anyway.

• What needs to be done?

Nick Shinn

We can have two monitors, why not an auxiliary keyboard? 

Musicians can handle it.

Doesn't have to have the complexity of Shift, Command and Option modifiers, could just be a set of buttons with icons on them, plus the name spelled out, even.

The Optimus was clearly over-designed.

I used to have a Mac keyboard with an extra set of figures—a 'numerical keypad'—that was useful, I miss it.

(Ha, crossed post with Andreas!)

John Savard

I know that I've made sure to have an icon for Character Map on my desktop.

Art Lebedev made both the Optimus Popularis, a technology that should be doable at reasonable cost, and the Optimus Maximus, the original design, which is inherently expensive. That covered the two basic possibilities.

Of course, people don't necessarily look at their fingers when they type. On-screen menus for less frequent characters are good too, but if one wants some special characters to be readily at hand, then some sort of customizable keyboard - which can be the regular keyboard with appropriate shoftware and the AltGr (right Alt) key.

André G. Isaak

Andreas Stötzner said:

The organ cockpit, although devastatingly cool, is but a side-joke

A side-joke? But I want one!

André

John Savard

...some sort of customizable keyboard is necessary if one wants to rapidly type text in which a special character often appears.

Of course, in a text editor, one can always just change all occurrences of, say, %, to a special character after the fact. So we already have decent workarounds in most cases.

Nick Shinn

To return to Ebern’s post:

Forget the stylistic sets, how about making separate fonts for circled and solid characters?

Not just figures, but the whole darn show.

Of course, the character-to-glyph relationship would not be Unicode compliant, but the usability would be super simple.

***

However, I should point out that during my time as an art director and graphic designer, I don’t recall ever using circled numbers, in 20+ years of ads, brochures, books, catalogs etc., nor arrows pointing in any direction other than horizontally to the right. 

As arrows don’t generally appear in text, I would imagine that most people just put the arrow dingbat in a separate “text” box, and drag it into position, where they can rotate and size it till it looks good, as I did. Arrows are, after all, predominantly graphic elements, only text by virtue of the wonder of fonts and subsequently Unicode. Specialist fonts for science and maths may require some of these as characters, but not the general commercial market.

Maybe it’s just my style and anecdotal, but could it be that this discussion concerns answers to questions that nobody asks?

Andreas Stötzner

Nick Shinn said:

…

As arrows don’t generally appear in text,…

Arrows do appear in text, as a matter of fact. As do flowers, houses, airplanes, babies, smile faces, boxes, zodiac symbols, locomotivs and and and … you name it.

One of my recent works, about 160 pages like this, 100% text in the technical sense:

It has been entirely composed via the keyboard, it was a pain in the a§§§§, don’t ask me, how.

Nick Shinn

Yes, but that is what I would term specialist typography, rather than general usage.
Very wonderful, by the way!

Marc Oxborrow

I was delighted when FF Dingbats (and its circled numbers) was introduced. It provided a way to automate a particular approach to numbered lists using character and paragraph styles in QuarkXpress and, later, InDesign. I use(d) them for chart/infographic/map legends, too.

So, not entirely the province of specialist typography.

Ray Larabie

I made a font that produces circled alphanumeric characters. The sequence starts with an optional zero offset solid shape. The next glyph is container which determines the widths of the following glyphs. It has negative width so the following glyph will appear in the correct position. The following glyphs check the width class of the glyph to the left until a space or hard return ends the chain. The alphanumerics are monospaced in 6 widths and there are 6 container sizes.

Nick Shinn

I stand corrected, Marc—was half expecting that, although I wasn’t sure if it was you or Kent would first set me straight!

Andreas Stötzner

Nick Shinn said:

… that is what I would term specialist typography

It is, right; but: specialist or not is not the issue. There are Hundreds and Thousands of other ‘specialist’ cases out there, in science, in technics, in music, in math, in commerce …  And as of General: everyone nowadays spices up her texts with smileys and squirrels heavily, that is – text.

We need to depart from the idea Text = language notation. It is more. In the examples shown above and here, language notation is but a part of the whole text. The other part(s) can consist of ideographic/pictographic notation, music notation, Sutton signwriting, geographical notation, and others. We need to get the bits and bobs onto the keys in a straight and tangible way, whatever they are.

Nick Shinn

I get it, Unicode equates characters with text; emojis have Unicode, therefore they are text.

So I’m now considering putting lots of ♥s etc. in all my future fonts!

Pi for everyone.

Helmut Wollmersdorfer

Andreas Stötzner said:

The organ cockpit, although devastatingly cool, is but a side-joke, of course.

One of the first typesetting machines had a piano keyboard. 

The only one ever in use at the Imperial Printing House in Vienna around 1850 had 4 (?)  keyboards x 120 keys.



Here in use (the second one from the foreground):

Helmut Wollmersdorfer

Andreas Stötzner said:

• What needs to be done?

Thought recognition.

Mark Simonson

 Thought recognition.

There's no way that could be misused. 

John Savard

Mark Simonson said:

There's no way that could be misused.

In addition to potential privacy concerns, there is another possible issue.

If we start using our minds to control our machines, what happens when we sleep, and the ancient, more primitive, part of our brains sends out stronger signals...

Yes. We could end up like the Krell!