[IxDA Discuss] Bringing typography to design – High-ASCII

[Jim Drew]

>From: David Cortright <davecort at gmail.com>
>
>   2. Designers don't tend to use these characters because they don't
>   know about them or because they are difficult to generate using a standard
>   keyboard.

It's seldom stated as one of the plusses, but for people who need to use such characters, the Mac is a major step up from Windows, making it about as easy as possible to use an accented é or “curly quotes” or a true… ellipsis.  (This message © 2007.)  You have to remember what keys some of them are mapped to, of course, but it's sure easier than accessing the numeric keypad and refering to some other list for the alt+4873 code (whatever character that might hit).

(And some Windows apps steal the alt-numerics.  iTunes, notably, swipes several of them, so Character Map has to be resorted to to create special characters in playlists and such.)

And as a flip side of that, when the characters are easier to access, people learn to use them as a result, which promotes their use further.

-- Jim
   Seattle
   On a Mac now, Windows later <frown>