Keyboards - Availability in Canada

[Amanda Yilmaz]

Slack Rat 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
>

One thing you should bear in mind: even though keyboards all over the
world come with all sorts of characters printed on the key caps, from an
electrical point of view there are really only three basic *hardware*
layouts: the US hardware layout (47 graphic keys, also used in English
Canada), the ISO "European" hardware layout (48 graphic keys, used for
European, Canadian French, and Canadian "multilingual" keyboards), and
the Japanese hardware layout (50 graphic keys).

All of these layouts produce the *same scan codes* per physical key.
That is, if you connect a French AZERTY keyboard to a computer with the
German QWERTZ layout chosen in software, and you then type A, you will
still get an Q on the screen because the A on a French keyboard produces
the same scan code that the Q on a German keyboard does. It's actually
the X keyboard driver that translates the scan code to produce the
correct character.

So even if you do manage to find, say, a French AZERTY or a German
QWERTZ keyboard in Canada, you can't just swap it with a US-style QWERTY
keyboard and have everything work right away; you will *still* have to
change the layout in software nevertheless. That fact makes switching
between different physical keyboards less useful than you may think
(unless you're a hunt-and-peck typist).

XKB (which is part of X) allows you to switch the software layout
*without having to restart the X server. You can configure it to make up
to 4 software layouts available at once, and define a key combination to
switch between them whenever you wish (this is what I do to switch
between English and French). If you're using GNOME or KDE, both of them
have control panels which allow you to set this up from the GUI.

One small detail: the extra key on ISO-style keyboards (usually located
at the lower left of the keyboard, next to the left Shift key) produces
a unique scan code which is inaccessible from US-style keyboards. This
means that if you select a European or Canadian French layout in
software while using a US-style keyboard, you will effectively be
missing one key (since those software layouts are designed for ISO-style
keyboards with the extra key). For example, the Canadian French layout
uses this key for the guillemets (French quotation marks). So in that
case you will have to find some other way of producing the guillemets,
possibly by copying and pasting.

You should also be aware that Canadian French and most European software
layouts use the right Alt key as a kind of third-level Shift key to
produce still more characters. On ISO-style keyboards, this key is
usually labelled "AltGr", but you can think of this as simply another
name for right Alt, since the scan codes are the same. Importantly,
AltGr + E produces the "euro" symbol on most European layouts (an
important one to know these days!)

Amanda
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