Keyboards - Availability in Canada

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 04:43:13PM -0500, Mike Kallies wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Slack Rat <slacker-MOdoAOVCFFcswetKESUqMA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > Are say FR, DE, FR (not CF) etc  keyboards generally available in Canada
> > without the prices being $megabuckz ?
> >
> > Or is there a keyboard marketed that would give all of the required
> > characters ?
> >
> > Currently I swap in and out as required although this is a drag as X
> > needs to be reconfigured and resterted each time
> 
> Canadian Multilingual should give you everything you need, but it's a
> horrifying keyboard layout:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Canadian_Multilingual_Standard
> 
> The location of the pipe and the backslash are awful, also consider
> that stuff like umlauts require double-keypresses.  Gnome seems to
> support it on my system.

Rather unfortunate given the ISO 9995-3 that it almost matches has the
pipe and backslash where you would expect them to be (as in it is totally
US qwerty compatible).  I suppose you could put stickers on a US keyboard
and use the 9995-3 mapping.  I haven't figured out if X even has a full
9995-3 layout.

> That's the only single keyboard I know of which could do French,
> German and English.
> 
> Personally, I think you're better off looking at ways to change your
> keyboard input dynamically and use the European layouts and then
> touch-type, or use a marker on your keyboard :-)
> 
> Gnome and KDE seem to do keyboard layout changes pretty well.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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