Keyboard key terminology

[Jonathan Jesse]

I personally think this discussion seems a little silly.  We can talk about what the gnome user guide uses, but that may different from what the kde-docs user guide uses, or what the openoffice guide uses; etc....

People who use a computer should be able to  translate the difference between enter and return.  If we start trying to take in account each keyboard the docs become meaningless... My phones keyboard doesn't even have a label, just the "universal" synbol for enter/return.... 

-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Bull <philbull at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 4:45 AM
To: Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt at myrealbox.com>
Cc: Ubuntu Doc <ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com>
Subject: Re: Keyboard key terminology

Hi Matthew,

On Sun, 2008-04-13 at 08:52 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Mac laptops have a Return key but not an Enter key.
> 
> All other laptops have an Enter key but not a Return key.
> 
> Mac desktop computers have both: Return in the keyboard's main section, 
> and Enter in its numeric keypad.
> 
> All other desktop computers have two Enter keys: one in the keyboard's 
> main section, and the other in its numeric keypad.
> 
> So in summary, it's much more common for a computer to have an Enter 
> key than to have a Return key. Calling it "Return" risks people being 
> unable to find the key at all. But calling it "Enter" risks people on 
> the Mac thinking that they have to go all the way over to the numeric 
> keypad, when they don't.

The second option seems more palatable to me. We could always put a note
somewhere in the docs mentioning the equivalence of the keys, perhaps in
basic-commands:

"After typing a command in the Terminal, press Enter to run it. If your
keyboard has a Return key, pressing that will have the same effect as
pressing Enter."

> I wonder if the help could use an &entity; that has a different value 
> depending on what hardware Ubuntu is running on.

It would be possible to use an entity, but that wouldn't work for people
browsing the documentation online and would require a patch to Yelp. As
such, I don't think it's worth the hassle.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
http://www.launchpad.net/people/philbull


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