Sorting it all Out Michael Kaplan's random stuff of dubious value Be sure to read the disclaimer here first!
Friend and colleague and fellow keyboard expert who has written a tool for keyboard construction that I feel is much more impressive than mine Marc Durdin recently blogged a blog on his Blog entitled Robust key message handling in Windows.
The permalink for the blog was one I found particularly amusing:
http://keyman.typepad.com/keyman_weblog/2008/06/robust-key-mess.html
:-)
This blog really covers many of the often complicated and often confusing issues I have covered over the years here, quite concisely.
I will briefly excerpt the one section most near and dear to my heart:
Shortcuts and Characters and Accelerators ... oh my Unfortunately, there is no clear guidance on precedence between these three types of input. Word does the following, which is fairly typical: Shortcuts take precedence over characters - Ctrl+Alt+O switches to outline view Characters take precedence over access keys - AltGr+O generates the ó character Left Alt+O will open the Format menu. That sounds almost like the best possible compromise. But is it? What if your computer does not have a right Alt key? Should Ctrl+Alt+O insert ó or should it switch to Outline view? I believe that Word's current precedence is wrong: There is an alternative method for accessing Outline view through the menu system; It is easy to redefine a particular shortcut if you really want to use it; It is not easy to redefine your keyboard layout, and accessing the ó character through Insert|Symbol is painful. Unfortunately, Windows does not make changing this precedence easy for application authors -- in fact, it is basically impossible to do it robustly. So, to make the best of a bad situation, let's stick with what Word does - at least it is familiar to end users!
Shortcuts and Characters and Accelerators ... oh my
Unfortunately, there is no clear guidance on precedence between these three types of input. Word does the following, which is fairly typical:
That sounds almost like the best possible compromise. But is it? What if your computer does not have a right Alt key? Should Ctrl+Alt+O insert ó or should it switch to Outline view? I believe that Word's current precedence is wrong:
Unfortunately, Windows does not make changing this precedence easy for application authors -- in fact, it is basically impossible to do it robustly. So, to make the best of a bad situation, let's stick with what Word does - at least it is familiar to end users!
Yes, this is that issues I have gone on about in Get off my freaking key! and many others, though he definitely went the extra mile to describe an aspect to it that I have never done in a blog before....
Anyway, Robust key message handling in Windows is a really cool blog, so cool that I almost wish I had written it. :-)
But I am perfectly happy to point to the one who did.
I'll probably even be digging in to some of the aspects of it that I find particularly interesting in the future....
This blog brought to you by ᔹ (U+1539, aka CANADIAN SYLLABICS YWA)
In the last item in the Suggestion Box as of the time I wrote this blog, Gé van Gasteren asked in comments
Word does provide another way to generate characters that it stomps on, for the most part. It has a series of deadkey-like chords for generating accent characters; for example, Ctrl-',O generates "ó". The problem with this behavior is that it's not widely known and not extensively documented. Even to this day I have yet to run across a Spanish teacher who doesn't resort to Alt+0243 rather than AltGr-O, Ctrl-Alt-O, or Ctrl-',O
Regular readers may recall that I have mentioned Marc Durdin in the past, especially in posts like the
It was almost 4½ years ago that I wrote some basic rules.
Rules for developers.
Rules for