Keystrokes vs. Characters

The Spector Client supports capture of non-Western characters, such those used as Chinese, Russian, Japanese, etc. You can view both the keys actually typed by the user and the formatted single-byte or double-byte characters resulting from the keystrokes.  

• Keystrokes are the physical keys you press on your keyboard. Pressing keys on the keyboard may or may not generate a character.  For example, to generate capital A, you would type the SHIFT key (which does not generate a character) and the A key. The first keystroke is a dead key because it does not produce any characters by itself.

• Characters are the glyphs (the pictures of characters) displayed as a result of the keystrokes. The dollar sign glyph $ on a standard western keyboard is generated by pressing the SHIFT key and the 4 key.

Multiple Keystrokes to Input Characters

Many languages (like German) require multiple keystrokes to generate common characters, and the keyboard used may be substantially different. To create the â character on a German keyboard, a user presses our ~ key (which has a different picture on the German keyboard) and the A key.

IME Assistance

Some languages (like Japanese) have too many characters for a normal keyboard to accommodate.  For these languages, an Input Method Editor (IME) helps users enter characters. For example, the Japanese IME converts the keystrokes nihongo into these three characters:

Client Recording Method

When the Client Recorder is set to Capture Character Information, the Client will use the local Windows OS information to capture both the keystrokes typed by the user and the characters (double-byte if necessary) that Windows created from those keystrokes. For languages like German, Hebrew, or Japanese, the Viewer provides the Keystrokes view (which doesn't make much sense) and a formatted Characters view (which shows the characters as the user meant to display them).