Boris writes:

> What if I were a touch typist (if only) and were familiar with the 
Ukrainian, 
> Portuguese (Brazilian) and English (US) keyboards.  I think I would tend to 
> get quite slowed down by your method.  The best tool I've seen (for 
Windows) (
> International Keyboard Kit out of Canada) allowed you to set the keyboard 
as 
> it should be for the selected alphabet or define your own keyboard mapping. 
 
> At any rate, its just a thought.

If you were using a nationalized keyboard that had the OE character on it, 
when you struck that character you would immediately get the OE character in 
QCTerm (each character is just an 8-bit pattern, and the OE key is primed to 
generate the correct bit pattern), without having to press any sort of a 
modifier key.

But if you did press the OE key and then pressed the F11 key, you would enter 
the "o" loop at that point and cycle around it in perhaps this fashion 
(depending on which language you had selected):

     oe -> accented o -> grave -> caret -> diaeresis -> tilde -> slash
          -> masculine ordinal -> unmarked o -> oe

Indeed, on this form of nationalized keyboard, there might be two or three 
ways to enter the loop because there might be two or three keys that generate 
the specific symbols in this list.

In the process of altering a character's markings, all we're doing is reading 
the current character's byte value out of the terminal's text buffer and 
transiting to the next character's byte value in the loop based on a state 
transition table and placing that new value in the previous character's 
position. If you had the Ø, Œ, and O all on your keyboard, you would 
instantly get those characters, with no further modification. But if you 
pressed the F11 "special characters" key, you could change an Ø into an Õ, 
suitable for Brazilian text, even if you were a Norwegian.

What we're trying to do is make QCTerm capable of printing any or all of the 
Windows-extended Latin-1 characters, using any keyboard, "nationalized" or 
not, but particularly so from a standard American English keyboard, where all 
characters are created equal (and unmarked).

Wirt Atmar