Typesetting dashes and related glyphs

Are you able to move this post and the ones after it here?

I still want to use Baskerville, but maybe a font that supports Unicode and looks a lot like Baskerville.

Oh.

  • What's that first character?
  • Unicode emojis?
  • I imagine you'd want the last one. You're on a Mac, after all.

The first character is an em dash. The sixth one is a minus sign, which is typeset wider than a hyphen but narrower than an en dash. I have en dash further down the list.

That smiley face predates emojis by a long time; I think I first saw it in the IBM PC extended ASCII. It's the only one, no frowney face or anything.

Yeah, the propeller is for places in the manual or other documentation where I have to explain how to do something on different platforms.

Is there a character for the middle-mouse button? I'm editing a Scratch Wiki page to add that, in Scratch 1.4, when fill screen is off, middle-click does the same thing as Alt-click or -click. ([offtopic]copyable command char there[/offtopic])

I don't think I understand the question. Afaik there are no glyphs for mouse buttons, not in Unicode at least, although I've seen pictures like left middle right in X11 software.

This X11?

Yup.

I wonder if there's a Wikipedia page for characters in it that aren't in Unicode. (Or something like that.)

I'm not sure those are official characters. They might just be pictures (like the ones I drew -- if I can do it anyone can), or something more like cursors. I don't remember offhand exactly in what context I've seen them, but next time it happens I'll take a screenshot. :~)

Oh.

The ones you drew were pretty good. One thing I myself don't like about them is that the left and right buttons on mouses aren't usually the same shape as the middle one.

Like the arrow-with-tail pointer?

Ok.

I think you're thinking of things like scroll wheels, or two-button mice with another one kludged in somehow. But the Alto three-button mice, and the Engelbart mice, had three identical buttons.

Sure.

Yes, I am thinking of ones with scroll wheels.

My best guess at the shape of my mouse:


(the smallest button there is the CPI button; it changes the mouse sensitivity.)
(Side view; it's ergonomic)
(why did I just get reminded of a laptop with a tiny mouse thingy in the middle of the keyboard?)

Hmm... I'll have to check it out.

Now how to distinguish left-middle-right with that?

Alto mouse:
alto mouse
Engelbart mouse:
I'm getting a whole bunch of results for this, which only has one button:
engelbart mouse

Interesting. This must be something that changed over time. I'm pretty sure that at the time of the Mother of All Demos you could use the three mouse buttons plus the five chord-keyboard buttons to input a character by its eight-bit ASCII code. (The idea was that moving back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse takes a lot of time, and it's worth doing if you're typing a whole paragraph, but if you're just fixing a typo it's faster to use the mouse to navigate, and use the mouse-and-chord-keyboard to enter the one or two corrected characters.

I wouldn't swear that anyone other than Engelbart himself committed the ASCII codes to muscle memory, though.

I think WWW means the little red track button on ThinkPads.lrt

That's exactly what I was thinking of.

It looks really stupid, but I've used ThinkPads, and it's actually pretty useful and easy to control.

Also that's a kaomoji.

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