Bug#777643: general: possibly, some keyboard layouts should use U+22C5 DOT OPERATOR instead of U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT
Package: general
Severity: normal
Hey.
Sorry for reporting against general, but actually I'm not quite
sure which package(s) is/are canonically responsible for the
keyboard mappings in all different places (console, X, wayland)
these days.
Some keyboard layouts (at least the German one) give the
· (U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT) on some combination (here it is AltGr+;).
Close to it (with respect to the location of the combination on
the keyboard) are the characters × (U+00D7 MULTIPLICATION SIGN)
and ÷ (U+00F7 DIVISION SIGN), again on the German keyboard layout.
So I’d conclude that · (U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT) is intended to be used
as a multiplication sign here,... in most non-Anglophone countries
at dot, rahter than the cross (i.e. × (U+00D7 MULTIPLICATION SIGN)),
is used as multiplication sign.
However · (U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT) is not intended to be that
multiplication dot operator, even Unicode itself states:
“for multiplication U+22C5 DOT OPERATOR is preferred”.
So I’d guess that in all such keyboards where · (U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT)
is mapped and intended as multiplication sign, it should be
replaced with ⋅ (U+22C5 DOT OPERATOR).
Cheers,
Chris.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.0
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_DE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_DE.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
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