[thelist] non-Roman characters in URIs [was: [TIP] - Use UTF-8whenever possible]

[Symeon Charalabides]

Hi all,

I should probably take this, as a professional Greek person...

> > I may be missing something, but in looking at the Greek 
> > Polytonic keyboard and the Russian keyboard I do not see a 
> > way to enter Roman letters.
> > 
> I've just been informed by a Greek colleague that there would be the
> Greek *and* Latin characters displayed on the the keys, and the user can
> then soft-switch between the Latin and Greek keyboards. This would be
> true for any letters that do not look the same in both alphabets,
> otherwise a single symbol is printed on the key.

The only difference between "Greek" and "Roman" keyboards, as far as my 
experience goes, is that Greek keyboards have the Greek letters printed on the 
keys under the corresponding Roman letters, in smaller type, and when they don't 
coincide (a, for instance, is the same). They don't differ in terms of function 
one bit though: If you want to type in Greek, you press left Alt+Shift in 
Windows, or whatever you set your switcher to be, then Alt+Shift again to keep 
cycling through your available languages. As long as your OS supports the 
character set, you can input Chinese or any other language using a Greek or a 
Roman keyboard. The only difference is what's printed on the keys.

As regards the first poster, the implication seems to be there are keyboards with 
only Greek and no Latin characters on them. I've never seen one, but am not 
surprised that they exist. It still doesn't mean you can't use them to input 
Latin characters though - how would you go about doing 95% of a computer users 
work?

Symeon Charalabides (cosmopolite trainee)
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http://www.systasis.com