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Extended keyboards: Can they save typography?

Ralf Herrmann

Everyone is a typographer today, as we can all typeset, style and publish texts. But the art of proper micro-typographic typesetting is getting lost, because our current input devices were never meant to give us access to all characters necessary for sophisticated typesetting. Why is that? And can we do anything about it?




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Some assorted thoughts:

  1. It would be wonderful if there was an augmented keyboard standard allowing professional typesetting for every language, and surely having the glyphs printed on the caps is a must.
  2. Having such standards would also allow to produce less cluttered keys, with only a selection of options visible. That could serve both to appeal to non-professionals interested in good typesetting, and to gently educating on the possibilities.
  3. Unfortunately having a standard isn’t worth much if it’s not implemented. A tangential example: Apple used to produce Italian keyboards according to the ISO standard with, among other things, numerals accessed with the shift key (I, being a number pad user, very much appreciated those ten lowercase punctuation and symbols keys), but at some point they switched to a variation of the US layout (with some accented characters sneaked in), because that’s what Windows users were used to.
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Additionally, augmented keyboards for niche markets already exists. Video editing and music producing comes to mind, but I’m sure also video games. The problem with those, though, is that they’re mostly tied to specific softwares.

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Great video. I'd certainly use a UK version of an augmented keyboard. I agree it's not for everyone, and maybe there's only a small market in each country. However, if your successful kickstarter is a good indication, then it's certainly commercially viable!

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