Slashdot Mirror
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.
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).
Xenu brings order!
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