I’m just as excited as everyone waiting for my red F77 order to ship later this year! I think that Ellipse is putting a lot of effort into making sure things are made to spec and as this is not a cheap keyboard, I feel like he’s doing a good job and staying very transparent to the ups and downs of the production process.
I have often felt frustrated with the right hand number block because on one hand I have very little need for numbers, and on the other hand the Home/End/pg up/pg dwn/insert option leaves a lot of blank unused keys sitting around the arrow cluster.
I use the markdown syntax to write, using pandoc to export directly to PDF or to LibreOffice or Ulysses to finish (and export). I only discovered markdown about three yeas ago, but I’m totally converted, love it.
So I was thinking about getting custom keys for symbols that I use all the time to format using the markdown syntax; these include: # * > \ (and a few others) and I though that this would be a perfect way to have a right hand block that would actually be really functional, using all the keys for stuff I use regularly. Instead of calling it a ‘right hand block’, it’d be a propper ‘writer’s block’… 😉
My question to everyone: Is Unicomp our only solution to buy custom keys? Does anyone know how good or bad their custom keys are? On internet forums some people say they are fine, and other people say they are junk–granted all the posts that I found where several years old, so I don’t know if things have changed at all since or not. I ask because I know some of you may have more knowledge about different suppliers and group buys that might be alternative solutions. I wish that Ellipse would make custom keys, but it sounds like he’s sticking to producing standard sets only, which is understandable.
Anyone have any thoughts about the matter?
kind regards
I wrote Unicomp a mail, they replied.
ME: I am interested in 1 unit keys, each one printed with one of the following symbols centered on the key :
# hash symbol
* star symbol
! exclamation point
? question mark
>\ greater-than sign
” quotation mark
\ backslash
Is this something that you are capable of doing?
UNICOMP: You can order the keys you are looking for here:
http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/PRK
On the product page they do state:
We only print standard key legends.
1. I don’t know why they told you, Nathan, that they don’t do custom keys, and they told me they do…?
2. When they say that they only print standard legends–Does this imply that if I want a key with greater than symbol I get < –OR does it imply that I will get a key with .> (period and greater than symbol) like what you see on a regular keyboard?
3. I get the sneaking suspicion that Unicomp’s definition of ‘centered on the key’ might actually mean printed on the upper left hand part of the key…