Keyboards - Availability in Canada

[Amanda Yilmaz]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 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.

I've been doing some poking around, and though I haven't found a
standard 9995-3 layout in X yet (a curious omission, considering how
many other weird layouts are in there - "Portugal Nativo for Esperanto",
anyone?), I've found a layout that's very close: the "United Kingdom
Macintosh" layout. Unlike the other UK layouts, this one puts `, ~, \,
|, and @ in their US positions, and almost everything else in its
standard 9995-3 position; the sole difference from 9995-3 appears to be
that the £ and # symbols are reversed (£ is shift-3 and # is AltGr-3,
which is to be expected of a British layout; AltGr means the right Alt
key). With this layout, you can type just about anything in any Western
language, though using AltGr-3 for # may take a bit of getting used to.

Another option would be the "USA International (AltGr dead keys)"
layout; this is the same as the Windows "USA International" layout,
except that you use AltGr plus ', `, ^, ", ~, etc. to access accents
rather than having ', `, ^, ", ~, etc. be treated automatically as
accent keys (which I always found extremely annoying, since to get an
actual ', `, ^, " or ~ character you then had to type it twice).

Yet another option would be the classic Unix "Compose" key method, where
you type a designated "Compose" key followed by two other characters in
sequence to get a "composed" character (e.g. "Compose", "o", "e" yields
"œ"; "Compose", "e", "`" yields "è"; and so forth). Since modern PC
keyboards don't have a "Compose" key like old Unix keyboards did, you
must designate one in software to use this method (perhaps the right
Control key?)

Amanda
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