Martin Vlietstra proposes a new British technical keyboard that includes non-breaking spaces and some common characters used for metric symbols. In his proposal, he considered various categories of user and using the restriction of inline Unicode characters, has proposed a keyboard that will not only handle all the characters needed by SI, but will also handle many of the characters needed for chemical formulae, and includes Greek characters such as ‘π’, ‘θ’ and other commonly used symbols from mathematics and physics including ‘×’, ‘÷’ and ‘±’. He uses the standard British keyboard as the basis for his proposal and explains how a lot of new characters can be supported using key combinations with the Alt Gr key. It covers a lot more than the extra characters for the correct display of metric symbols.
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A better use of multiples?
To ease the transition to metric measures, straight substitution of units is often used – kg for pounds, metres for yards, km for miles and so on. Ronnie Cohen argues that, as a result, we fail to take advantage of metric’s superiority in dealing with a range of numbers, including the very large (and small).
Metric Views 