On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 23:08 +0200, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

Stuart Jansen wrote:

...

As far as I can tell, ConTeXt doesn't include a keycaps font. I recently created my own and would like to share it with anyone else that might find it useful. I've included a sample document with it. If you're on a *nix system with a working copy of ConTeXt and make, just type "make" to build it.

Very nice! I would like them to lay closer to a standard baseline, though,

I'm not sure what you mean by "lay closer to a standard baseline". The baseline of the glyph inside the key is aligned with text outside the key. I waffled back and forth trying to find the most attractive position while building the font. The majority of keycaps fonts I looked at chose the same baseline. I welcome any tweaking. Especially the addition of keys from other keyboard layouts. -- Stuart Jansen Guru Labs, L.C.

At 02:16 PM 9/12/2005, you wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by "lay closer to a standard baseline". The baseline of the glyph inside the key is aligned with text outside the key. I waffled back and forth trying to find the most attractive position while building the font. The majority of keycaps fonts I looked at chose the same baseline.

I welcome any tweaking. Especially the addition of keys from other keyboard layouts.

It occurs to me that one thing that would be particularly useful in a keycaps font would be pieces from which one could construct a "key" around a letter from another font -- specifically, a left side, a right side, and a middle portion made up only of purely horizontal lines so as to be extensible. One could potentially also have these in "short" and "tall" versions, depending on how the rest of the font worked. - Brooks

Brooks Moses wrote:

At 02:16 PM 9/12/2005, you wrote:

...

On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 23:08 +0200, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

...

Very nice! I would like them to lay closer to a standard baseline, though,

I'm not sure what you mean by "lay closer to a standard baseline". The baseline of the glyph inside the key is aligned with text outside the key. I waffled back and forth trying to find the most attractive position while building the font. The majority of keycaps fonts I looked at chose the same baseline.

Having looked at the uploaded .pdf, I agree: very nice!

I do agree with Nikolai that there appears at first glance to be a bit of a baseline problem. As you mention, though, the baselines are "right". The actual difficulty, in my opinion, is that the font is just a bit too small, and so the _tops_ of the keys are too low -- it looks odd for them to be lower than the tops of the capital letters, when the depth of the keys is so large.

Why not just center the characters? No problem for most of them since they have the same height (due to the upppercase char); All keyboards are different in positioning, so it does not hurt that much. By centering on gets a better look and feel. Concerning the 'construct a key' approach, how about the following: - provide shapes for a single, double-wide, tripple-wide, tripple height, enter-shape keys. - next we can make a series of virtual fonts using the new condensed latin modern (sans or monospaced) that way also keyboards for other languages can be constructed; I guess that a simple perl/ruby script can construct the virtual font. Nice initiative Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

Christopher Creutzig wrote:

Hans Hagen wrote:

...

Concerning the 'construct a key' approach, how about the following:

- provide shapes for a single, double-wide, tripple-wide, tripple height, enter-shape keys.

Wouldn't it be reasonable to just create these borders via MetaFun? That way, I can have \key{\triangleleft home}, \key{any}, or even special keys for play station etc., without them being provided originally.

sure but it's kind of inefficient.

...

- next we can make a series of virtual fonts using the new condensed latin modern (sans or monospaced)

Oh, and I could have keyboard keys matching my current font, whatever that may be.

that would be true if there was a keycaps shapes font that could be combined with a regular font (making a virtual one) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

On Mon, 2005-09-12 at 23:08 +0200, Nikolai Weibull wrote:

...

As far as I can tell, ConTeXt doesn't include a keycaps font. I recently created my own and would like to share it with anyone else that might find it useful. I've included a sample document with it. If you're on a *nix system with a working copy of ConTeXt and make, just type "make" to build it.

Very nice! I would like them to lay closer to a standard baseline, though,

I have uploaded a new version of the font with the baseline shifted. Specifically, I have aligned the top of the heavy black bottom bar with the baseline. In my documents at least, this is much more attractive. Not sure how I arrived at a different conclusion initially. http://blogs.gurulabs.com/stuart/ As suggested by Hans, I've also been trying to understand more about defining custom encodings. Perhaps I will soon be able to post a version of the font with easier to access characters. -- Stuart Jansen Guru Labs, L.C.

Hi, I have tried with: \startcases .. \stopcases and many others variations but I have got only errors. Any hint? Thanks. jk

At 04:58 PM 9/12/2005, Brooks Moses wrote:

At 04:42 PM 9/12/2005, Jilani Khaldi wrote:

...

I have tried with:

\startcases .. \stopcases

and many others variations but I have got only errors. Any hint?

Much like the bmatrix environment, the cases environment is an AMSmath package feature, and ConTeXt at present has very few of the direct equivalents to those implemented. You'll need to make this one up with a Plain TeX \matrix, as well. (The TeXbook is a pretty good reference for this.)

I should follow my own advice! As the TeXbook points out, Plain TeX has a perfectly good \cases command which is also present in ConTeXt, and which you use like this: P_{r-j} = \cases{ 0 & if $r-j$ is odd,\cr r!(-1)^{(r-j)/2} & if $r-j$ is even.\cr } Note that, in this version, the text in the second column is _not_ enclosed in a \text command; the \cases command handles that automatically. In any case, the output is identical to the previous version I gave you, but this is easier to type. - Brooks

On Tue, 2005-09-13 at 01:02 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:

is that really texnansi? these Function-1 keys etc are not in texnansi ...

All I know for sure is that it Works For Me(tm). Unfortunately, my ConTeXt skills don't yet rise above that.

so, an option is to make a special encoding vector, say keycaps.enc and define proper names, like

\definecharacter functioni .. \definecharacter functionii .. \definecharacter functioniii .. \definecharacter functioniv ..

which permits:

\definefont[keycaps][...][encoding=keycaps]

{\keycaps ABC\functionvii DEF}

That would be easier to use. It's also worth noting that I saw some, but not all, keys defined in Unicode. -- Stuart Jansen Guru Labs, L.C.