Why is there a $ but no cent? Who decides what goes on a keyboard? Is there an ISO standard or something? Can someone describe alternate keyboards of the past? (I know about Dvorak vs. Qwerty; I’m talking about which glyphs are or are not included).
With a standard U.S. keyboard, you can make a hyphen but not a dash (neither em nor en). You can’t type letters with accents over them in one keystroke. You can’t type some simple math symbols like the “divided by” sign; you know, the line with a dot over and under it. These things don’t come up that often, but I have more occasion to make a dash than to use, for instance, @, #, ^, &, and *.
There is. If you have the keyboard with the keypad, use Alt0162. If you don’t have the keypad, use the character map.
¢ (I know it’s little and hard to read, but I swear that’s what it is.)
As for why it’s not normally on the keyboard like the $ is? Probably because it’s not commonly used by your average typist. I rarely use it, and I play with nunmers all day.
All the codes can be found by running character map (if you’re using Windows). In Windows 98, it’s under Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Character Map Alternately, see the thread ¡ ásçìï çöðès for Special Characters using PCs!
Also, what key does what is simply a matter of configuration. I’ve switch from UK to US to Icelandic to Chinese layouts and they all have their differences.
Bottom line - it WAS arbitrary, with many competing interests attempting to get their say as to what characters were important enough to be represented in the available seven bits (an 8 bit byte, with a parity bit left over).
I know you can make all manner of oddball symbols with software access to the ASCII character set and other indirect methods. In fact, mathematical typesetting, in which one revels in the arcanities of matrices, integrals, summations, and indices, is a hobby of mine. What I was getting at in the OP is how the characters that are directly accessible by typing a single keystroke on a standard keyboard were decided upon.
I think, as KneadToKnow pointed out, the cent key is redundant. But, in this age of global communication, I’d like to see on my keyboard £ and é at the very least. Maybe the Yen symbol too (dunno how to do that one ).
The Euro symbol has been adopted by the computer companies, but unless you have a relatively recent browser and OS (I don’t), it won’t show up for you.
The Euro sign was includd in the ISO 8859 family, by creating codepage ISO-8859-15, where it replaces the “international currency sign” at position 0xA4 (dec 164)
The cent is also in there at position 0xA2 (dec 162).
I don’t know how well Windows supports ISO-8859-15, but with recent versions of X11 there are no problems.
If your code pages are set up properly this would be:
Euro sign : ?
Cent sign : ¢
Everything will be much easier when we all use Unicode (ISO-10646) though…
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