Thread:VisualEditor/Feedback/character inserter - Icelandic

Here is some feedback on the character inserter, focusing on using it for Icelandic.

There are three usecases here. Firstly the native icelandic users that use an icelandic keyboard, then secondly non-icelandic users that are writing icelandic words, such as the given name of an icelandic person and then thirdly the usecase for old icelandic texts at wikisource and wherever they are mentioned on wmf projects.

Usecase 1: Usecase one does not really involve the character inserter at all, as there has been an icelandic keyboard in Windows and Mac since the 1990´s.

Usecase 2: In order to know what characters people without an icelandic keyboard setting need, we need to specify what keyboard they do have, or just assume that they have as small subset of icelandic characters as possible. Lets take the english keyboards as an example and exclude the characters that are allready in the character inserter. An UK keyboard user would need the "Ðð", "Ýý" and "Þþ" characters, an united states keyboard user would need the "Ðð", "Íí", "Óó", "Ýý" and "Þþ" characters. An us international keyboard user would not need any accents.

If we assume that the user has no characters with diatrics or other specific icelandic characters, which I would think would be as small of an subset of Icelandic characters as possible, then the characters mentioned for the US keyboard (the native one) would need to be added. I would like to add though, that Icelandic does use an opening qutation mark that is placed at the base of an character - so the qoutation marks become „”. This character can´t really be added in other keyboard layouts (except Romanian and others), so I would propose adding that aswell.

Usecase 3: Lastly I would like to mention the third and final usecase, for old icelandic texts. In old icelandic texts, the current quotation marks are not used, but there are entirely different quation marks, which look like so: << >>. This is a problem, as these symbols are not present in the current icelandic keyboard layout. US keyboard users would probably not have a problem with this, however. I am not certain that I have mentioned all necessary characters for this usecase, but I do think that is it. Despite that icelandic alphabet has changed considerably during the past decade, the old icelandic alphabet was closer to the basic latin letters then than it is now, and this does not give any issues for the character inserter.