From: Steve Anderson (steve_at_prodplay.co.uk)
Date: Tue Nov 18 2003 - 07:05:57 EST
T.A. MCALLISTER wrote:
> It's not hard to invent your own keyboard layouts. I use deadkeys,
> one for each accent (e.g. forward-slash followed by any letter
> produces that letter with an acute accent, if it can take one; back-slash
> for grave accent, and so on). With that method it's easy to type any or
> all of the Latin-alphabet languages with a single keyboard layout; no
> more of that tedious switching to the AZERTY keyboard to type
> French, then having to use the QWERTZ layout for German, then back
> to English, and never being able to touch-type because you're never
> sure which keys A, Y and Z are on at any given moment.
>
> That method is also easy to remember: all acute accents are controlled
> by one dead key, all graves by another, etc, so it's pretty intuitive. You
> can type all of the Western European languages using only 7 dead
> keys: Acute, Grave, Umlaut, Circumflex, Tilde, Ligature, and "Other".
Just as an aside, that is the best method that I've ever used on any
computer system. Way back in the day when I was on a terminal hooked up
to a VAX VMS computer of some description (we're talking a good 15 years
ago here) the terminals had a 'Compose' key which (via VMS, I imagine)
would take the next two characters you typed and try and match them up
to a character it best represented. It worked perfectly, not only for
accented characters but also for most other characters needed from time
to time; copyright was Compose-o-c, for example, and Yen was
Compose-Y-hyphen. I've never used anything since that was that obvious
and straight forward.
I know this is a little off topic but you've just reminded me of how
good that feature was!
Steve
--- Steve Anderson ----------- Senior Programmer, B-DAG Cyf The Productive Play Company http://www.prodplay.co.uk ----------------------------
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