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Buying International Keyboards?
dmayle asks: "I've been investigating the purchase of some non-US keyboards for the flexibility it would give me in correspondences (easy access to the Euro symbol, accented characters, etc.). Specifically, I've been looking at U.K. keyboards, which are still QWERTY (as opposed to the German QWERTZ, or the French AZERTY), even if some of the punctuation is placed a little differently. The problem I have is that I can't find a U.K. company willing to ship keyboards out of the U.K. So, where does the Slashdot crowd go to satisfy their internationalization need? Any favorite importers? (Not just for keyboards, but in general.)"
I bought my UK keyboard in the UK and brought it back to the US with me. That probably isn't very helpful but...
Have you tried Amazon.co.uk? The only things that they have refused to ship me are Region 2 DVDs. Admittedly, I haven't tried buying a keyboard from them.
On the other hand, I was down in Central America recently and saw that many keyboards there have at least 108 keys, some even more. (Extra keys for and such.) YMMV.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
...but perhaps you could create a small text file with all of the commonly used alternate characters? Then, it simply becomes a matter of copying and pasting what you want when you want it.
Either that, or spend a day and memorize your character map (I suspect that alt+0128 will become a best friend for you). =P
Try a French-canadian one. It's a good compromise and still remains QWERTY. Not that it has any EURO symbol though, but it's closer to the US.
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
PCKeyboard.com stocks non-USA keyboards in five flavours: French, German, Latin American, Spanish, and UK. They're $79 a pop, but they're built like tanks and will last longer than your computer.
"Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone." - Dutch Schultz
You need international stickers that you can put on your own keyboard. For Windows you need Keyboard Layout Manager to set up your own layouts from whatever alphabets you have on your machine. For Linux I think there's XMaps, but I might be wrong.
The UK doesnt participate in the Euro :)
Google for international keycaps, dude.
Here's where I go for all my keyboard layout needs:
man setxkbmapShipping is damn quick, and good prices too.
eBay?
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Cherry makes keyboards for all major layouts and can refer you to companies that ship internationally. They also have (or had) a pack available with all of the five or six major layouts in one bundle -- this is commonly purchased by test labs who need to make sure Windows apps will work on each.
http://www.worldlanguage.com/ProductTypes/Keyboard s.htm
Looks like they have a whole passel of different languages/formats.
Enjoy!
YOU FAIL IT
I've been looking for a US keyboard myself given that european keyboards aren't as programmer-friendly. To get {[]} you need to press Alt-Gray + 7, 8, 9, 0, the "quote" symbol is shift 2, you can really tell that programming languages were created in america, and made for american keyboards. I dont know who the heck came up with these crappy international layouts... i've switched to american layout for the past couple of months and found it most productive.
Up for a swap?
The first time I ever saw a Hungarian keyboard I made a mental note never ever to use one again. Only the 'Z' and 'Y' are swapped in the letters but everything else is all over the place. I once spent ten minutes in a Budapest internet cafe trying to find the '@' symbol so that I could send an e-mail.
You have three alternatives. Either find a friend in the right country who is willing to ship the keyboards surface freight, or go there on vacation, or (as I did) bring a good supply of keyboards with you when you move countries. I'm still using a Compaq Easy Access keyboard with USA layout and I have three more in the closet when this one dies or the girlfriend spills nail polish on it.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
It might be easier to look up the AltGr key combinations that apply to your keyboard, for example on a UK keyboard the Euro symbol is produced by AltGr+4, according to this microsoft site on a US international keyboard it should be AltGr+5.
AltGr+vowel combinations produce acute accented versions of the vowels.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
And that's too bad. The Euro key is just shift-opt-2... I correspond regularly in German and even the umlaut is easily accomplished with the logical way that extra characters are handled on the Mac. It is dead simple.
This is not a troll... I know you aren't about to buy a Mac for this purpose. It's just that I think a lot of people don't realize the little things like these that Apple really has figured out (and the keys have worked this way for a LONG time!).
Sun keyboards are pretty good, and you get some extra keys to play with as well. I'm sure you should be able to remap them to something in XFree, dunno what Windows does with them.
bring one with you!
get this bad boy, and tote it along.
since it's a playstation accessory, it's far easier to get internationally, but it's usb, so compatibility is guaranteed.
Imagine you want to write out Jean-Baptist Moliere's name correctly--and in all caps, to boot. Now, that first e should carry a grave accent. So do you just find a keyboard with a capital e+grave on it? Let's say that your system interprets a keypress there to mean character number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-1 (Latin1 for Western European languages) eight-bit encoding, this number is indeed a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE.
So you might appear to be all taken care of. But you aren't. Tomorrow, you decide you'd like to write "correctly" the famous name of the inventor of robots, Karel Capek (aka Karla Capka). That C there should carry a caron, because it's not pronounced "Kapka", but "Chapka". So you go find yourself a Czech keyboard, and lo and behold, it has the proper character!
Are you set? Not at all; to the contrary, now you're I in trouble. Because you might well find that the character generated by that key, as recognized by your computer, is also number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-2 (Latin2 for Eastern European languages) eight-bit encoding, that same 0xC8 is now taken to mean a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON.
See the problem? If you look at Karel's name in your trusty Latin1 locale, it will be screwed up, and if you look at Jean-Baptist's under a Latin2 locale, then it will be screwed up. You can't win.
Now, as for the Euro symbol, you're going to have even more (none-)fun, because you aren't going to find a suitable ISO eight-bit encoding that includes it. The 8859's just aren't going to do it for you.
Of course, were this but in ISO 10646 (that is, in Unicode), these particular problems do go away. There, the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE is at U+C8 (yes, really; the same as in Latin1), but the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON is at U+10C, a completely distinct numeric code point. This is as it should be, since those really are different glyphs, so they shouldn't share the same numeric representation. On the matter of the Euro for your keyboard, under Unicode, you've even got EURO SIGN sitting there at U+20AC for you.
Even if you tried to go this route, I suspect that you're probably just exchanging one set of problems with another. After all, how well is your system truly set up for you to use Unicode? Can it map keyboard events into appropriate code points? And what about the tools you're using? What are you going to do with it once you have it? Consider the multiplicity of external encodings for the same code points, such as for disk storage, network transfers, etc, that you find in UTF-8, UTF16-LE, etc.
So, I don't think there are answers to the submitter's query that are at all so simple as others have presented the matter here. For the curious, here's a good reference on the mess we're in now, called appropriately enough, ISO Alphabet Soups.
--tom
I recently bought and assembled a computer for my dad, and was surprised to see that NewEgg had a Chinese keyboard for $7. Since my dad's Chinese, I got it for him... I doubt if he'll actually use it to type Chinese, but if he ever wants to, he can.
I recently removed the keycaps while cleaning my Keytronics keyboard, and found some spots where extra keys could be installed. An extra key was hidden under each shift, one under the Enter key, at least one on the numeric keypad (under the larger keys), and one under backspace, IIRC - this results in at least 108 keys.
There were no keycaps on the keys, but I moved a few existing keycaps to those locations. They worked, and produced unique scancodes. If I got some shorter shift/enter/... keys, and new keycaps for those locations, I could use it as an international keyboard (the replacement keys should be easy enough to find around an office, just pull them from some retired keybaords).
I also found that the caps lock, num lock, and scroll lock LEDs could be moved from the upper right of the keyboard, to directly under their respective keys (in case you had keys with clear windows on them). It looks like the same electronic board is used in many different keyboard models.
> Now, as for the Euro symbol, you're going to have even more (none-)fun, because you aren't going to find a suitable ISO eight-bit encoding that includes it. The 8859's just aren't going to do it for you.
Sorry, but I have to disagree here : the ISO-8859-15 (latin0) has the EuroSign at offset 0xA4 (IIRC this position was occupied in ISO-8859-1 by a rather unused character, I think it was the 1/2 but I'm too lazy to check). Most if not all West European Linux users already have switched to ISO-8859-15. Windows users, of course, have their own charset (Windows-1252), but they are largely compatible, from what I saw Windows just stuffs a bunch of characters in the range 0x80-0xA0, but the rest is unchanged, including the Euro position.
Now, don't get me wrong : I wholeheartedly agree that Unicode is The Right Solution[tm]. Still, Unicode support is at the moment a bit hesitant (I tried it : after generating the right locales, loading the correct fonts, and so on, I saw several applications broken by the change. I suspect some libraries still aren't ready). Thus, until the OS vendors (and the hardware ones : I would love if my BIOS was intelligent enough to know I've not an US keyboard) have cleaned up the mess and made their systems easy to migrate, the much-despised ISO charsets are the only semi-valid solution. Better not to ditch them too fast...
Xenu brings order!
I highly recommend a French Canadian keyboard. (It's not the same as a French keyboard, btw.) It's very close to the U.S. keyboard (QWERTY and all, and none of that funny stuff on the numeric line), and you get most accents at your fingertips. It's useful even when typing English, especially for words like facade, resume etc. Or even if you need a degree mark °;, you have it on the keyboard, because the French word for number is Numero, and is abbreviated N°. (an abbreviation that English borrowed: ever wondered why Number is abbreviated No. when there are no 'o's in the word? In comparison, the Germans abbreviate it as Nr. because the German word is Nummer)
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And if you need a full U.S. keyboard, just flip your keyboard language (Ctrl-Shift in Windows, but you can bind it to other keys), and there you have it.
The great thing is that the keycaps on a French Canadian keyboard has both U.S. and French marks on it. So you can use it as a U.S. keyboard exclusively, if you want.
The other good thing? A cheap French Canadian keyboard is only C$12 (US$8.69) from Microbytes (www.microbytes.com) in Montreal.
And if you really don't want to buy a new keyboard at all, you can just install the layout and start using it. Here's a guide:
(http://www3.uakron.edu/modlang/french/ke
Downside: no Euro character though.
nt
I learned the Dvorak key layout simply by having a printed sheet of paper next to my keyboard. Proper typing technique doesn't have you looking at your hands anyway.
Hehehe i know what ure saying man.. i have an US keyboard in home and here in work i have a brasilian ABNT2 one. im brasilian. they are preety much the same, the only thing is that brasilian abnt2 has theese extra keys ==> '`c^~"' == ya americans would no prob use the c but the other are pretty usefull. if u are interested in a keyboard with the euro simbol, try a portuguese from portugal one. they look a lot with brasilian ones but have some diferent keys, that include euro.
I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
Some say (article: ) that Unicode isn't as suitable for multi-lingual use as the hype claims it to be, for example, munging different glyphs into the same code which mean you can use it for chinese or for japanese but not both without it looking weird. 16 bits apparently is too small to represent everything they want to represent.
Oh, and did I mention it doesn't support the copyleft symbol. It has the entire klingon, ancient egyptian, ancient norse, and elvish alphabets, but no copyleft symbol.
Go HERE and look around, specifically under Bargain Bin. At one point, they had a metric buttload of SGI international and domestic (US) USB keyboards cheep..... Slimmer pickins now, but you should still be able to scratch your itch.