Hebrew punctuation on the keyboard layout?

re: Hebrew punctuation on the keyboard layout?

Michael S. Kaplan — Mon, 29 May 2006 22:24:13 GMT

Hello Haber,

As I have posted previously, Microsoft has to be a follower in this area whenever it can, rather than a leader -- following the standards provided by governments, by keyboard hardware, by de facto standards provided by the marketplace, by customer requests, and so on.

With that said, this blog is an area where feedback can be and *is* gathered, so information given here by customers is something that people notice (lots of the folks from my group read here regularly, even though they never comment themselves -- they must not like me! <self-deprecating grin>).

re: Hebrew punctuation on the keyboard layout?

Haber — Mon, 29 May 2006 22:00:23 GMT

To Ilya-- hear, hear! It's about time someone brought up this issue.

In response to Michael, though, I don't think that technical issues are really what's preventing these characters from being integrated into the Vista keyboard. More likely, it's just uneasiness on the part of whoever's responsible for the layout to make such a significant break from the keyboard people are already used to. If there were a real push to go through with this kind of change, technical problems could be overcome: as you brought up, there are already some suggestions that could be developed.

And in my opinion, adding a few punctuation marks to the Hebrew keyboard layout shouldn't a problem, especially considering that Hebrew has 22 letters vs. the European 26. For example, if there were a decision to move all the sofiyot letters to shift keys, we will have already cleared up 5 extra keys!

Finally, might I also point out (in addition to what Ilya has said) that it appears the lack of "smart quotes" in Hebrew computing has caused our low opening quote marks to disappear? If you take a look at almost any old printed Hebrew text from the early 70's and back, you will notice that opening quotes are low (as in German), and closing ones are high, often going above the letters themselves (as opposed to the gershayim, which should be level with the letters). Here is an example:

”שלום„

It seems to me that since the advent of the Hebrew keyboard layout, where this is not accounted for (and unlike many other languages-- it is not corrected automatically in programs like Word), the distinction in Hebrew between opening and closing quotation marks has completely disappeared, in addition to being lumped together with the gershayim. And since we're discussing desired improvements to the layout, I guess I would add this point as well.

re: Hebrew punctuation on the keyboard layout?

Mar — Thu, 25 May 2006 22:46:10 GMT

Discounting software autoconversion, as far as I know the correct quotation marks aren't present in any Cyrillic keyboard layout except Macedonian, and are missing from many Latin layouts like the Italian, Spanish, Serbian, French, Danish, Norwegian, Albanian, Icelandic, German, Swiss etc etc. Perhaps this has changed for Vista?

By the way there are punctuation problems with Armenian that are similar to those with Hebrew. For example the Windows XP Armenian layouts use the colon rather than the Armenian full stop. Similarily the WinXP Georgian layout lacks the U+10FB Georgian Paragraph Separator.

re: Hebrew punctuation on the keyboard layout?

Michael S. Kaplan — Tue, 23 May 2006 19:12:57 GMT

Well, in languages that use those punctuation symbols, they ARE on the keyboard. The question of using Hebrew punctuation is a lot less clear....

re: Hebrew punctuation on the keyboard layout?

Centaur — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:56:06 GMT

I suggest that « » “ ” … — – also be available on the keyboard, for the same reasons. After all, Word is not an input method. It’s not even in the box.

Of course, making proper punctuation characters available does not mean everybody will use them. Half the Russian users refuse to type the letter YO (Ё) despite it being there.