Designing an input method

[C.discussions]

Hello,

Thanks for your reply. I have a few questions based on those. Could
you please have a look.

1. This movement notation does not use any of the alphabets found in
the QWERTY keyboard. Instead, it uses around 50 odd symbols. Given
this, I do not require the standard keys i.e A - Z. So, will Word
allow me to map my symbols over the characters A - Z ? If so, can I
write some kind of a script to achieve this.

There's rather more to creating a font than simply mapping your symbols to
character values. The mapping part itself is easy: you create your own font,
with your characters inserted with whatever values you choose. Eg, the
symbol you assign to position 65 will appear when you press A. But for this
to work, both Windows and Word need to know the font metrics, in particular
the width. There are plenty of font-creation applications around. Do a
Google. It's a big subject.

2. There are some special requirements also. We have a few symbols,
which (depending on the context) can appear on top of each other. Let
me give an example. 3 followed by a 4 should be output as ¾. Same
goes for say 12 followed by 24. At the same time, in some completely
different context, 3 followed by a 4 should be output as 34. This
effectively means that I need a two way input mechanism - a Top to Down
writing method along with the exisitng Left to Right method found in
most editors. Can I get this functionality in Word ?

No, there's no way to do top-down writing in Word.

My understanding is that you can write Chinese & other oriental
languages in a top down manner. How does Word accomplish that ?

Either define these composites as additional characters, which you assignto other
character sequences (control codes or whatever)

Well I considered this option. But the problem is that I have around
3000 such combinations. Creating 3000 glyphs in a font might not be
feasible.

or experiment with Word's text positioning fields (EQ, Advance, etc), andcreate
macros to generate field sequences that produce what you want.

Could you please elaborate a bit on the above features. What are text
positioning fields, and why are they used ? What do you mean by field
sequences ?

Thanks much,
Chandan