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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.
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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.
I second this proposal : the Canadian Normalized Keyboard has a huge lot of symbols, including accented capitals, french guillemots, and other useful digraphs like Spanish punctuation, copyright/divide/multiply/etc. symbols, and so on (sorry I can't show them, the lameness filter has apparently decided that showing characters is lame :-)... Sure, you can get all this with your Compose key if you're an Unix guy, or with Alt and a good understanding of the ASCII table if you're a Microserf :-) But it's a lot more pleasant to be able to type them directly. Note this keyboard has no writings whatsoever on the keys, it only use pictograms to avoid making two versions of the keyboard (one labeled in French and another in English). I did find a picture of the key arrangement (descriptions in French. Sorry, couldn't find an English-labeled image, but the keys described are obvious enough anyway). They also have a list of resellers providing this item (incomplete, though).
As an aside, if someone knows how to get that beast in France, I would be glad if he would let me know the address (no, I won't pay the astronomic shipping fees from Canada).
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