Henry Story wrote:
| I have placed a couple of pictures of apple azerty keyboard online [1],
| to help those who may never have seen such keyboards. I also found a
| picture online of what I take to be a german keyboard [2].
|
| As you can see there are two symbols on the "alt" key. I take the
| symbol below "alt" to be the symbol for the compose character key.
The icon on the key is Apple's standard icon for "option", modelled, I think, on the electronic schematic symbol for a switch. The icon came into being, as far as I know, because developers were adding option-something key equivalents to menu items, and some visual indicator was needed similar to the cloverleaf icon used for "command".
The word "alt" appears there for the benefit of Virtual PC and its kin, I suspect. Most keyboards I've seen label the key with the word "option", omitting the icon. (This is true of both the beachball-iMac-era keyboard I'm typing on and the nearly-new-iBook keyboard beside me.)
| But [Apple's "option" key] certainly seems to be
| different to what "alt" is used for in windows, which usually has a
| special key for character composition to called alt-gr to the left of
| the white space.
I'm sure all those words mean something to someone who already knows Windows. Can you explain what "alt" does without assuming Windows expertise?
For what it's worth, "option" as used by the Mac is nothing more than another shift key. It changes the code generated by a key, just as the shift and control keys do, but to a different set of characters. From the (OS 9 version of) the Apple Human Interface Guidelines[1] (p. 279):
The Option key, when used in combination with other keys, produces a set
of international characters and special symbols. For example, in many
Macintosh fonts, Option-4 produces the ¢ symbol, Option-R produces Ò,
and Option-G produces Ó. Shift and Option can be used together, in
combination with a character key, to produce yet other symbols. For
example, Option-Shift-? produces the Spanish ¿ character.
(If the non-ASCII characters don't come through intact, they're a cent sign, two different accented "o"s, and an inverted question mark.) Note that the description treats "option" as just another modifier, not as any sort of prefix key.
| It would be really handy to have a document explaining the mapping of
| these control, alt, meta and hyper keys to their windows and apple
| equivalents with explanations of their usual intended purpose for each
| purpose.
This isn't as simple as it looks, because Sun wrote into the Java code many bits that assumed Java was running on a PC, and wired in particular uses for keys even when that use conflicts with the platform's definition for that key.
If what you want is "how does a platform-native app use the keys?", the answer (for Apple) will be in the Human Interface Guidelines. (At least, they were present in the OS 9 version. I assume the Aqua HIG has them, too, but I haven't looked.) Presumably, Microsoft has an equivalent document for Windows, although I've never found anything near as detailed as the Apple guidelines.
Glen Fisher
[1] http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/HIGuidelines.pdf
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