[Web4lib] What is the microkey?

[Phalbe Henriksen]

Thanks. More than I asked for, but not more than I needed to know.

Thanks to all of you who have responded to my question. I was thrown by the 
"micro" and "key" for obvious reasons -- Microsoft, the possibility of the 
patron meaning "macro," and it actually being a key. Somehow my brain 
didn't think "insert/symbol," which I've done many times, but haven't 
needed to in a long, long time.

I'm embarrassed.

Phalbe Henriksen


At 04:52 AM 6/23/2005, you wrote:
>Bob Rasmussen wrote:
> > 1. From the charmap utility, select it and copy it to the
> > clipboard. Then in whatever program, Paste it in.
>
>Most operating systems and web browsers should also be able to
>copy-and-paste from
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Unicode_characters%2C_128_to_999
>or
>http://unicode.coeurlumiere.com/
>
>If you forget these links, just google for "unicode table".
>
>Fifteen years ago everybody around me were using 7 bit ASCII (or
>ISO 646) codes which allowed for 96 different printable
>characters, i.e. the English alphabet A-Z, lower case a-z, digits
>0-9 and the usual !"#$%&/()[]{}+-/*=.  Each European language had
>their own national version of ISO 646 where some characters from
>U.S. ASCII were substituted with the necessary national umlauts.
>Britain only needed to substitute # with £.  For Sweden it meant
>an Ä (A-umlaut) typed on a Swedish keyboard would show up as a [
>on a U.S. screen, and any Pascal or C program would look very
>strange on a Swedish printer, since a[4] would come out as aÄ4Ã
.
>On a Danish screen or printer the [ would instead show up as a Æ
>(AE-ligature), which is fine, since Danes have little use for Ä
>anyway.  Since both the Swedish Ä and Danish Æ sound somewhat like
>an E and the [ looks somewhat like an E, most programmers would
>learn to read text like R[KSM\RG]S just like RÄKSMíRGÃ
S.  There is
>a lot of programmer folklore about this.  For example, RÄKSMíRGÃ
S
>(shrimp sandwich) is a good test word that contains all three
>special characters used in Swedish.  You smile when your local
>store or airline check-in desk prints receipts with U.S. [\]
>instead of the Swedish ÄíÃ
, because you know the reason.
>
>Then in the years around 1990 three things happened: The Soviet
>Union fell apart, the Internet expanded beyond the academic, and
>the 7 bit ASCII was being replaced by the 8 bit ISO 8859 standard.
>This too was a framework standard with lots of versions, but one
>of them, called ISO 8859-1 or Latin-1 contained all 192 characters
>used in "Western and Northern European languages", i.e. both Ä, Æ,
>[, and ].  This became the default for Unix, Linux, HTML pages,
>even for Apple Macintoshes sold on Iceland.  Microsoft in Windows
>3.1 adapted their own expanded version called Windows-1252.
>
>Of course, these changes were interrelated.  Internet's expansion
>required that Swedes and Danes could easily communicate through
>e-mail without confusing Ä for Æ, so we clearly needed codes for
>both.  But as the Soviet Union fell apart, we also started to need
>codes for Cyrillic and all the accent marks used in Eastern
>Europe.  These were not present in ISO 8859-1 but in -2, -3, -4,
>etc. and there was no easy way to switch between them.  The new
>solution was Unicode or ISO 10646, which is a 16 bit code with
>room for 65,000 different printable characters, including those
>mentioned before plus Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK), Thai,
>Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, phonetic, and what have you not.  Well,
>some medieval European ligatures are still missing, so that needs
>to be fixed in the future.  But I guess that Unicode will do for
>the next fifteen years anyway.
>
>Many web and software projects are now converting and adapting to
>Unicode, including Wikipedia, the Linux operating system from
>Redhat version 9, the MySQL database from version 4.1, the Perl
>programming language from version 5.8, the Pine mail reader from
>version 4.61, etc.  But most users are still unaware of this big
>change, that will take several years to complete.  All major web
>browsers (but not Lynx, I'm told) support Unicode already.
>
>Of course, most people will never have keyboards with 65,000 keys.
>But all software will need to handle cut-and-paste, and screens
>and printers will need fonts that can reproduce them all.
>Fortunately, typewheel printers are long since gone, so we don't
>need to imagine what they would have looked like.
>
>Already ISO 8859-1 contains µ, but Unicode has the entire
>αβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρςστÏ
φχψω.  If that looks like 
>Greek to you, it
>means things are working as they should.  If instead it looks like
>garbage, either you or someone along the line should consider to
>upgrade to a Unicode-enabled version.
>
>
>--
>   Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>   Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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