Kaixo! On Tue, Aug 20, 2002 at 04:18:05PM +0200, Radovan Garabik wrote:
> What is the official typewriter layout as used on typewriters used > in Romania? > I guess the situation is similar to situation with Slovak layouts, where > the official typewriter layout is qwertz, but programmers absolutely > hate it (because among others, they cannot type many special symbols Probably, yes (and that is also the case for Poland and Lithuania) Note that having various choices of keyboards for a given place is very common anyway; here in Wallonia (south of Belgium) you can have about 55% of chances to get a Belgian keyboard; 45% of chances to get a French keyboard (they are different for all the punctuation symbols), and there are also US qwerty used here and there; if you go in the places were German is spoken, you can find German keyboards too (but those are less widespread; probably they result of people buying their computers in Germany). In other words: it is *IMPOSSIBLE* to automatically set the keyboard layout just out of the locale (language+country) info. It may work in some cases, but there are too much situations where it will fail. The solution of course is to allow the user to select which keyboard he wants (after all, he/she had to select the language and country too, so one more choice won't hurt), and that will solve the keyboard fights qwertz/qwerty. > But of course, typewriter qwertz is default for XFree86 (as well as No. The default is just plain US qwerty. Anything else needs configuration (either automatically done by the distribution (bad imho) or from user provided info). In other words, slovak qwertz and slovak qwerty are exactly the same, for XFree86. (If there are some XFree86 internal mechanism to select the keyboard out of the locale I wasn't aware of it, I knew nobody (I mean nobody) using it or relying on such a thing, and it has little interest imho) > for MS Windows), qwerty as the alternative in XFree86 or MS Windows is > a bit better but still unusable, Why unusable ? You mean the Slovak qwerty layout is incomplete ? ... oh, I see, the Slovak qwerty is - with the exception of Z/Y - the same as the qwertz one, exactly the same... I don't see that qwerty variant very useful indeed. But Polish and Romanian qwerty variants are quite different of the qwertz ones; there is not just the Y and Z switched; but instead a modification of the US qwerty to put in empty places the needed national letters. -- Ki �a vos v�ye b�n, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.stben.be/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Italian or Portuguese]
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