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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.)"
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.
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!
The only differences to the US keyboard are:
On my italian keyboard [ and ] are right next to the P, but you need to use Alt-Gr to get them, as they plain keys are used for [e`] and +. I guess that either keyboards have handy brackets (and ", and #, @ etc.), like the US and UK ones, or accented letters and other diacritycals, like [n~] and the like (oh, and btw, ~ itself isn't anywhere on my keyboard, just like { and }, it is either alt+code on win or remembering the positions on linux).
I believe that the actual key layout instead is the same between UK and IT: QWERTY, an additional key between Z and shift, even if it has instead of \, and one near enter (with [u`]).
I wonder what features are actually needed by the poster: euro sign only? wouldn't switch to UK layout via software be enought, since most characters are on the same key? or accented letters etc.? if this is the case UK woulnd't probably be enough.