the wrecking ball, here it comes!

Folks, I've got the keys, and over the next few months (sorry, I'm a volunteer!) I will be rebuilding the DSA website. The old website will be demolished. New one is going to be "better ... stronger ... faster" to quote an erstwhile seventies tv show. Virtually nothing will be salvaged but the best information, inshallah. Some features some folks love will be absent at first, priority given to the most relevant information; we can add bells and whistles later. (talking about the number of folks who visited this site thingy, popular when people still called the web the information super...well whatever Al Gore called it when he invented it).

If you have any requests lodge these now or crab not. like silly measurement modules and bad decimal habits, stuff gets entrained as production advances, so this is the time to say "you know, I never liked pandas", etc. (ahem the panda is the DSA mascot. There will be a panda somewhere - be warned). Don't like asterisks and pound signs that make dozenal numbers look like cartoon cursing? Good, that's going to be extinct. (well not in legacy articles). It really helps if you're a Member of the DSA, but any interested dozenalist definitely should have something to say about it. I am currently penning a structure and will post it if you like (no response means it's mine all mine).

One thing that definitely will happen is that the Duodecimal Bulletin (of which I am the editor and production dude) will be increasingly linked to web content found at the website, so that the two work together. The entire set of Bulletin back issues are available in late-1990s html glory; the interface may improve but so will the indexing, so that you might find an article more easily. Again, this will happen over time, (volunteers, we are) but all the DSA "media" will work in a unified manner in the future.

Because of the symbology question, the one quirk unique to dozenal writing, much of the content will be in PDF form, although we can still furnish a generous amount of writing in html/xml.

As a business owner, there may be delays, but I intend to have a live site up in some form by 2010 January 1. The site will grow organically (naturally! I mean it will be modular and add content as time goes on). The planning phase will inshallah be complete by mid october. Much of what's going on now is that the earlier nice-guy service-oriented "would you like more tea sir" approach only led to confusion and delay (sorry, too much Thomas the Train from my kiddos), so now I am in execution "gitter dun", "crackin' skulls" mode. So kvetch now or forever be disgruntled!

Post it! Post it!

I've been hoping somebody would do this for a while, so thanks for undertaking it.

I think I'm a DSA member; I sent in my check, which afaik has been cashed, but I haven't heard anything about it. But for whatever help that is, as you mentioned, there it is.

You can't find a Unicode approximation?

Dgoodmaniii, will post it. Have the january friendly good guy structure. Now am writing the bad to the bones bad guy structure. actually it ain't bad; just less tip-your-hatty. There are things, lots of legacy things that should be re-displayed. one thing that particularly irks me is the hey-daddy-o quality of the legacy material, like guys in fedoras wrote it all. Let's put a little hip hop in the new stuff, shall we? (serious talk: all the legacy good stuff should be updated and made relevant to our time; all stale legacy stuff should be retained as is and findable in a sort of archive. I don't want to front-window any stale legacy material.)

The great thing is that much dozenal mathematical thought is highly persistent, i.e. it don't change much (multiplication table, fractions, yada..) But some things are dressed in the 1960s and 1970s and that needs to be redone for today. There is a way to make this material more timeless. But someday a young pup will take all my legacy blather and knock the 911-y Obama-y financial crash-y-ness out of it too. hip hop will be wack, or whatever they'll say, and that won't be my concern, in the retirement home in non-florida (because florida will be an undersea bank, great for fishin')

as for unicode: only what you see here. Dan if you have a way to force load fonts, then indeed I will develop fonts (i've built several dozen) to represent the transdecimals. ain't a programmer by trade but know enough to get by convincingly...

Doesn't HTML5 have a means for force-loading fonts? Or at least some means of displaying fonts even if not present on the client's machine? I'm at work and don't really have time to look it up, but I feel strongly that I've read something along those lines recently.

Of course, that doesn't help as long as people are still using Internet Explorer. But with Firefox, Chrome, and Opera already integrating HTML 5 elements, perhaps some magic determining whether there's HTML 5 capability in the browser and using it if so, but displaying some sad Unicode-equivalent otherwise, would be possible.

Don I researched force-loading. We won't be doing it, as much as I want to. Too many people use legacy browsers (and I include the latest IE in that category because it doesn't implement HTML5). there are third party add ons, but we're not going to pay a hefty monthly licensing fee to do that. So we will have to make do with standard characters. Many of the pieces of content will be in PDF form; this way we are not limited by HTML or browser. Many users have PDF capability, as well. The website can't be designed for what can be regarded as boutique browsers only highly pointyheaded users adore (even though I can't stand IE, but hold my nose and use it cuz it's there). The hoi polloi need to access the content too. So we're stuck with the sad Unicode. Now that doesn't mean this situation will persist ad infinitum; one day most will inshallah be able to use HTML5 and beyond; in that case we'll adjust the CSS so that we can load proper symbols.

Next, the structure as it stands today.

This is the structure from the 2008 assessment. Don, e-mail me if you are interested, and I will e-mail you the full report, which gives a rough outline of the new tree. The entire site will be rebuilt, precious little of what currently stands will be retained (some of the content will be retained, but will be remastered or rewritten to eliminate the Kerouac-y-ness). In time the amount of new information will vastly outweigh the content that is present there today.

A. Home: Links:
--A1. A Brief Introduction to Dozenal Counting.
--A2. Panda
B. Who We Are.
--B1. A Brief History of the DSA (to be replaced with Vol. 49 No. 2 article.)
--B2. Why Change? (Remastered.)
--B3. An Application/ Subscription Blank (To be replaced with the current version.)
--B4. Student Reports & Projects
--B5. Meeting Dates. (will be html, will be kept updated once new site is live.)
--B6. Contact Us.
----B6A. Contact@Dozenal.Org
----B6B. Webmaster@Dozenal.Org (I am the webmaster, not aware of this account! Guess will need to make it!)
----B6C. dsgb@dozenalsociety.org.uk
----B6D. DSGB website.
----B6E. Footrule website.
C. Introduction to Dozenal Arithmetic
--C1. Symbols & counting. (this will be split. symbols will be very comprehensive, the article is nearly finished. It will have all published symbols, as well as those whose authors have granted permission. The counting function will be a separate matter.)
----A1. A Brief Introduction to Dozenal Counting. (Remaster or write a replacement.)
----C1A. William Dwiggins, Designer. (Already remastered.)
----C1D. Symbols symbols, etc. (Hmm).
--C2. 8 Rules for converting numbers between base ten and base twelve. (Remaster)
--C4. Elementary Tests in Dozenal Arithmetic.
----C4A-H. Tests 1 through 4, answers 1 through 4. (Have remastered 1, set up the template. Will do the entire span as it is easy once the template is set up.)
--C5. A dozenal calculator. (Will be retained).
D. The Duodecimal Bulletin (This section will be replaced by the public and Member's archives. The public archive is already up but not pointed to.)
--D2. Classic Articles. (remaster these, but frankly, low priority in light of the entire archive being available.)
E. Other articles.
--E1. Excursion. (Remaster).
--E2. Twelves and tens. (remaster).
--E3. My love affair with Dozens. (Remaster.)
--E4. Base-ten, a double prime (this was an early test I did in 2006. Not essential; the archive article is available).
F. Links.

Time to crack skulls. Have a show in illinois on 16 Oct but the field is clear thereafter, and am between crits, so this weekend will set structure and start page design. Today will build some content (lotsa typing!). If Members are interested, mail me and I will show you where the alfa site will be located.

The DSA site was hacked on Tuesday and was restored wednesday. I've changed a lot of the usernames/passwords so if any of you had these and you experience difficulty, contact editor@dozenal.org.

I'm interested in helping however I can be useful, so let me know.

I wouldn't sign off on non-IE users as all pointy-headed nerds, though obviously these are common. In Europe, Firefox actually has more users than IE7; over a quarter of American browsers are Firefox, as well, nearly a third by some estimates. Still, HTML5 isn't even a real standard yet, so it would be silly to rely on it, especially if we can find some reasonable facsimile Unicode symbols, or even just utilize inline graphics, which is cumbersome but would eliminate all font issues entirely.

A lot of the earlier material can still be HTML, of course, since Andrews used a simple X and E for the transdecimal digits. Will any of that be converted?

Don,

I could really use help inputing legacy material, then later writing original material. This is mainly typing work. After standards are set, there are plenty of other tasks, but development will be able to roll sweetly. The site will be off the hook (inshallah) once it's underway. am rolling into what looks like a slow autumn demand season, which "ironically" is good, because spring and summer were huge overtime seasons. am ahead for the year and will roll much of the downtime to the website and the Bulletin (inshallah). This site must be up 1 January 2010. That is my deadline, without a burning deadline I get nothing done. Note it doesn't have to be "finished", ask Shaun if his site is "finished"! It will grow organically. We've got gigabytes of space to fill.

Let's redo MODS (Manual of the Dozen System), sort of as it was, but with fresher examples and plenty of graphics. We'll rustle Mathematica to produce nice tables; yes, sure we can compute figures like logs and sines, but a handy reference is also nice. I think the "measurement system" presented therein can be retained mainly because it is neutral. This lets folks like P. D. Thomas retain ownership of Modulor, and TGM stand on its own as a separate subject. This avoids "crowning" any measure system. The things we can do today to produce a manual vastly overpower anything a team of professionals could have dreamt of in the 1960s. Let's use this power to blow the thing into the stratosphere.

There will be features such as the following. Each dozenalist has more often than not produced their own symbols. I'd like to feature these symbols, described by their inventors in their own words (yes these will be edited), each in their own pagelong PDF. That would allow folks to compare systems. I plan to solicit this input in the Bulletin, if I remember it.

The late Fred Newhall's comprehensive dozenal index will be updated, available to Members. This will be linked to all the content in the DSA archive, as well as the DSGB material. That will be a massive effort.

Thinking of producing some sort of weekly or monthly feature. Don't want to call it a blog, but maybe that's what it is. I'd like to have a variety of writers (hopefully at least 3) thus a variety of thoughts; ideally these writers would have more or less free reign to write anything dozenal, the dozen in today's culture (because in some way I think we already ARE a dozenal culture). Like to try and keep it as pictorial as possible as well.

When I "rant" on groups of people, I guess it's usually in jest and self-deprecating, mainly because I am a nerd. (any a'y'all who haven't figured that out by now, hmm). I actually would like to use non-IE but IE, along with PowerPoint (which I completely despise despite the fact I've probably made nearly a million using that clunky software), and many other popular pieces of software are ubiquitous: everyone knows it and what it does, so basing things on these de facto standards virtually guarantees you're reaching a great deal of the population.

Yes, the site will be good old HTML. This is because we are a volunteer org, and I don't know if I might be alive in a year (no one does) so I'd prefer whoever might be around then to pop the hood and edit things as simply as possible. I am playing with PHP, and may take a concentrated week of courses at UMSL's west campus near the end of the month to acquire the danger. (I've coded in javascript, and tons of other languages, but I'm nowhere near as good as Dan who does it for a living. I can code to save a life but hate debugging).

As a general rule we'll use X and E for ten (dek) and eleven (el). No, it's not perfect but it is practical. This complicates things a bit, because I've built much of the technique of the font system the DSA uses around lowercase a and b, mostly so that I can marshall Mathematica's BaseForm[] command to generate output which can quickly be converted to anyone's symbols. We'll get around it, though.

Whatever you good folks tell me is worthy of "conversion" ought to be converted!

Any help will be appreciated!

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." (daniel burnham)

Icarus,

"a" and "b" by themselves, or with groups of numbers, should probably universally be converted to X and E, respectively. This should be easy enough to accomplish with two simple regular expressions:

Well, you know; simple for regular expressions, anyway. "With great power, comes great complication..." Those are basic ex regexps; running an ex script on your files should do the trick. If you want to use Perl or PHP, it will probably be slightly different, but for something so simple I think ex is probably the best route.

(Note that I haven't tested those, but the correct expression is something pretty close, if not exactly.)

Do you really want to retain the measurement system? While fine on its own, it's laughably incomplete, and at least as presented (as "the" dozenal metric system) it seems to exclude other possibilities. In other words, it presents it as a standard when it really isn't; indeed, I've never met anyone who actually utilizes it. (Not that I've met a whole lot of TGM users, either, but at least there are *some*.) It seems like it might be better to exclude measurement systems entirely, or to briefly describe more than one, than to leave one in that's thoroughly incomplete and completely unused.

Just send me what you want converted and I'll get to work on it. Procedamus!

Don,

will get back with you after the weekend. Have a huge deadline and will travel on thursday and friday. Back to the website next week.

in brief, I think the manual of the dozens system needs to remain "neutral". I think there are better transdecimal symbols than dwiggins, for instance, but we'll retain this system simply to discuss the overall system. I know the units are lacking but it is a neutral system. We can alter the text as we see fit, i.e. here is a simple system of measure; others are proposed, and link TGM and others. This gives the reader the ability to select their own desired system. Also, the TGM document can stand on its own. I do think we ought to link MODS to the other documents, once these are up.

You could begin entering TGM if you please. I am unaware (at the time of this writing) about any copyright. If it is copyrighted, of course, we cannot touch it unless we get explicit written permission from the author, unfortunately.

More later

If you do decide to make a new font, make sure to carefully consider which code points you use. The PDF files on the DSGB site redefine the digits 7 and 8 as and , which is definitely not acceptable if you ever want to copy and paste numbers into a calculator.

Interesting! I adapted a font for dozenal (and phonetic) symbols - and embedded the fonts in the pdf. The digits 1 to 6 were changed to "reverse" notation digits and 7 and 8 were changed to the DSGB symbols.
But they do show up correctly on other people's machines, don't they?

So what we need now is a font with DSGB and DSA symbols that don't use any other normal character slots.

I don't think Pendlebury ever copyrighted TGM; he gave the system to the world. And you couldn't get permission if you wanted it - he's long gone ...

I don't think Pendlebury ever copyrighted TGM; he gave the system to the world. And you couldn't get permission if you wanted it - he's long gone ...

According to the booklet itself, the booklet itself is copyright; however, the system is not. So while we might have an issue with the booklet, we can present the system as we please.

I'm not sure how it works in Britain, but we've got an absurdly long copyright period in America, which lasts well after the author is dead (life of the author, plus 70 years). The copyright descends like property after the author's dead. If Britain's got similar laws, there should be a successor in interest somewhere, even if, with a total lack of heirs, the copyright escheated to the state. (In which case it's probably public domain now; again, assuming similar-to-American laws.)

They do show up correctly for me — in the PDF file. But, for example, if I copy and paste the text here, it says:

That is interesting. As a LaTeX user, I don't need to worry much about code points; I just created a new font for my Pitman numerals, putting and in the slots for X and E (the system I prefer when working in pure ASCII), and LaTeX takes care of switching fonts for me. The symbols show up properly anywhere, e.g.:

Also, I wind up with \x and \e in my source, which makes substitutions for different systems extremely easy.

Of course, embedding the fonts in the pdf will be essential in all cases.

If you use the same fonts for your new symbols and for your current numerals, what do you use for 7 and 8, if and are assigned to them?

According to Wikipedia, Britain has the same absurdly long copyright laws as the United States.

But the British Parliament is allowed to have perpetual copyright (and does, for Peter Pan). The U.S. Constitution requires that it be for "limited times". I guess you could argue that even a billion years is a "limited time", but I don't see any justification for retroactively extending copyright terms.

Yes; you have to love the English constitution. Everything's constitutional, except when it's not. (I'm not being sarcastic here; an unwritten constitution has real advantages, even if it also has real dangers.) I'm definitely with you on the copyright period, though. The original copyright law in America, passed in 1792, called for a period of 14 years, renewable once, and that only if the original author was alive. That's much more reasonable.

In that case, and given that Mr. Pendlebury appears to have died, do we know who his successor-in-interest might be? Or do we want to just come up with a whole new TGM booklet for the DSA? (I'm up for either, to be honest.)

Don,

If you'd like to write a new TGM I'll set it into a document via InDesign and we'll have a PDF in short order. We'll knock their socks off.

Here's a few tips:

1. Just use text, you can write a Word file or plain text. I will grab your copy and pop it into the format and it will be ready. We can quote Pendlebury's work, as long as proper attribution is supplied.

2. Use lowercase a for digit-ten, lowercase b for digit-eleven. This way we can prepare a "Dwiggins" (DSA standard) or "Pitman" (DSGB standard) symbology. It would (in my opinion) make sense that this document be built using Pitman, but we can do both. No, this format does not matter in the least as regards output. Since it is PDF it will appear to the viewer to be plain old dozenal numerals, and not A and B or any other wackiness. I understand and respect any other view regarding how to encode characters but what will make the birds in the trees sing their song is lowercase a=decimal 10, lowercase b=decimal 11. Any other way means everything already done (the "system" in place) has to be redone another way, and we'll be delayed a year. Since the output is the same, the input actually doesn't matter (until someone wants to repurpose the text).

3. We can include images BUT these must either be public domain, or generated by the DSA. If you can provide a sketch or describe any diagram, I am a professional digital illustrator. We can certainly completely blow away anything that existed previously. (and we will!) If you want to conference, send me your info in an email offline: editor(at)dozenal(dot)org. Also visualize a cover. Let's make it live, inshallah. Have camera, will travel. Note well: no copyrighted imagery.

4. We are fortunate, being beings of the future, in perhaps (only??) one respect: we have computing power that Pendlebury simply couldn't imagine (umm, Asimov didn't: read the Foundation series. Why were they calculating their jumps?? Nerds.) This means that any ponderous system of charts can be completely redone to the 2000th (dozenal or decimal, it doesn't matter) digit. We have Mathematica, alhamdulillah!

5. In this work, as it would be an entirely new rendition of TGM, several things must be included:

a. Acknowledgement of Mr. Pendlebury. I don't know much about him. Maybe someone on the boards from England can help. I'd like to include a brief review of who he was. Perhaps he has a preface we can quote and credit. Would be grand if this came from a friend of his. We want to make the guy look great - it was his idea.

b. If this is a DSA production it will be copyright DSA, and will have some disclaimers which I will need to check with the board (the "elders"!) about. Yeah yeah I know GNU but I think we aren't prepared for GNU at this time. (You will have my help if this is a DSA production.)

c. The work should have a different title than that of Mr. Pendlebury's work. You will be the author, and this should be made known.

6. There is no "deadline" but somehow we should agree on how we'd make progress.

7. Wanna chat about it, email editor(at)dozenal(dot)org. I'll phone you. The Lord knows I don't use all my business minutes anyway. That commercial woman with the little ticking clocks would be pretty peeved! I phone the east coast all the time. (This unfortunately doesn't cover calls out of the USA: unless you think we'd chat quite a lot, then I can get a plan).

8. As with anything sent to me in my capacity as Editor, you will receive review material in the form of PDFs, before it goes out or live or whatever. Though this is not necessarily a guarantee that things will be cleaned up to your satisfaction, it is a means by which we can discuss refining the output.

9. Yes we can break the thing apart into smaller parts, perhaps test it on a "chapter" to see if you like where it's going. It's a great value, dude, cuz normally my bill rate is pretty high (not as high as a lawyer but close...) and this is totally free via the DSA for any Member who contributes an article we are entertaining publishing.

Sorry, can't come up with a dozen points. Gotta go home and watch the kiddies.

If anyone else would like to build a feature on the website, feel free to supply the text. I am the editor; the DSA reserves the right to edit, accept, or refuse the work. Other active Members, esp. the board of the DSA, may review the work as well. I will need to assemble standards but am looking for execution and trying to avoid analysis paralysis.

I am taking a crash course at UMSL on PHP so that we can produce a modular website. If that fails it will be a vast and dumb HTML site. PHP doesn't seem to be very hard to learn. Next big job commences after our cruise in early November. So have a couple weeks (minus some saw-sharpening time) to devote to dozenal.

The other thing I have to do in 2010 is put together the comprehensive dozenal index. That's going to be a chore.

The main font is Palatino; I created a copy of this (called Paladin) with the dozenal characters and some negative numerals; so the main text of TGM is in Palatino with the dozenal numerals in Paladin.
Obviously this was not the ideal solution as your cut-and-paste shows.
So what slots can I use for ten and eleven?

Whillock knew Pendlebury well - but he's passed on, too.
I'll start going through the old magazines in the hope of getting some background information on Pendlebury. But it's a long time since I met him and I have no notes from the past.

It's probably as ideal as they come. That's close to what I did for my Computer Modern LaTeX font; I just built an entirely new font, consisting solely of characters for and , in the slots for X and E.

I still like the idea of sticking and in the lower end of ASCII (as in, the lowest 31 code points), since people never use the vast majority of them. But until everyone agrees on that, this sort of solution is probably the best we can do.

Icarus, I know PHP reasonably well, and it's not very hard, particularly if you've got any experience with a compiled Algol-descended language, like C or (sort of) Java. Writing a whole new modular site design is probably overkill, however. There are lots of free software "Content Management Systems" (CMS) which will handle all that mess for you, with minimal need for programming your own. Unless you want to do something particularly different, searching for the right CMS might be a better use of your time than writing a new one.

Some options you have are:

• The Unicode Private Use Area (U+E000 - U+F8FF). That's what it's there for.
• The two characters that most resemble what you want and to look like.
• The letters A (U+0041) and B (U+0042). Good for compatibility with existing base converters.
• If you need an 8-bit represenation, choose from the set {0x81, 0x8D, 0x8F, 0x90, 0x9D}, which aren't defined in the most common Windows code page.

+AMDG

While they're not used in the Windows code pages, lots of systems don't use those code pages. 8-bit "extended" ASCII just isn't standard; standard 7-bit ASCII, on the other hand, *is* standard, and the first 31 slots of it are used for control codes, most of which nobody ever uses.

When was the last time that even the most serious coder ever needed to use a vertical tab control character, for example? The bell I'll give you, since lots of perfectly good old code makes use of it; but there are plenty of control codes that could easily have dozenal characters subbed into them.

This has the advantage of being added to the pretty much universal ASCII standard; as in, while most people use something *more* than ASCII, the first seven bits are identical to ASCII, so everybody would have access to it. Not so if we subbed in some eight-bit slots.

Some options you have are:

• The Unicode Private Use Area (U+E000 - U+F8FF). That's what it's there for.
• The two characters that most resemble what you want and to look like.
• The letters A (U+0041) and B (U+0042). Good for compatibility with existing base converters.
• If you need an 8-bit represenation, choose from the set {0x81, 0x8D, 0x8F, 0x90, 0x9D}, which aren't defined in the most common Windows code page.

What I mean is what key stroke(s) can I assign to the two characters? What combinations are not used on the standard keyboard? (And I'm on a Mac, not Windows, by the way.)

Shaun, others,

I have re-combed through all the Duodecimal Bulletins, Newscasts, and Journals for symbols as I am finalizing the next Bulletin focusing on Symbols. This has unearthed more from Mr. Pendlebury, who seemed active in the late sixties with ideas revolving around a comprehensive metrology system. Next week I will resume scanning, as I think I've found a way to de-bind the Dozenal Journals (carefully). This scanning process will take some time but hopefully this material can get into your hands (umm screens) in short order, so that you all might benefit from seeing them (except Shaun; he's got them!). I feel like I've read a miliad of pages of dozenal stuff in three days. omg All the wars had on this forum happened at least a handful of times before the sixties on paper.

Thus I believe in the case of the next Duodecimal Bulletin, I have all symbols ever written about by the DSA or DSGB in their main communication vehicles. I have some symbols where they are attached to real people's names from the DSGB website, and from Geocities websites before these were laid waste to last weekend (talkin bout Niles Whitten/nigellus alba; suppose crediting that old url is absolutely no use, as geocities have been nuked). Now time to make about two dozen fonts for the newbies, Chilton, early Ferguson, gautier, hinton, sparrow, whillock's extrapolation of pitman/essig, kala, newhall, all very creative indeed. I have some stuff from Ruthe. Looks like it will be grand. Anyone that wants in, please send me your symbols and they're in.

dgoodmaniii and I will rebuild TGM over the next year, inshallah.

Oh, you want to assign them to keys on your keyboard? Well, anything you want, really. The trick is knowing which code the computer should read when you hit the key, not making the key send that code, which is easy. As a sometime coder, I use all the keys on my keyboard already (yes, even "^" and "|"), but you could really replace any key you don't use very much. Just use whatever you Maccish folks use for a key mapper. (As a Linux user, I have lots of choices for that.)

A pet project I've had roaming in my head is a USB number pad, on which the "0" key is partitioned into two keys. That makes, not coincidentally, three columns of four keys each. So make the first 0-3, the second 4-7, and the third 8-. One day I'll do it. One day far in the future.

Good idea dgoodmaniii, but since we are talking not just dozenal digits, would your project have wider appeal if it included transdecimal digits at least as high as decimal 15, thus providing a instrument for their use also. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there already exist number keypads for hexadecimal usage with keys beyond 9 labelled A-F. Your project would be simplified if such a device exists.

While writing this I did a quick google search and found loads of designs for such devices including the following URLs. What would be even better would be to produce a device such that the keys have small displays that can be programmed to display whatever glyph one wished to design in the same manner as the
Optimus Maximus Keyboard.

This keyboard would allow for that facility as it stands, but the cost is exorbitant. They also produce a separate keypad version with a format of 3 columns of 5 keys. This could be modified to add an extra one or two rows to allow for either dozenal or hexadecimal usage.This keypad is the Optimus Aux.

Several other sites provide plans for other variations of keypads, and can be found by searching on Google for 'hexadecimal keypads'.

Hope this give you some ideas.