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.)"

Comments

An excuse to visit the UK ;-)

[leastsquares]

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.

A pretty keyboard doesn't necessarily solve this

[Tom Christiansen]

I hope you realize that you can paste all the happy stickers on your keys that you want, or even get all the keyboards with exactly those glyphs that you want already on them, yet still find yourself with nothing usable. What precisely are the codes being delivered by those keys, and how exactly will your system interpret such codes?

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

Re:PCKeyboard.com

[Chess_the_cat]

I bought my Model M at a thrift store for $2 Canadian. It weighs 6 pounds and was produced in 1984. No crummy Windows key of course. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. I'll never go back to another keyboard.

Re:A pretty keyboard doesn't necessarily solve thi

[wsapplegate]

> 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...