Le jeu 17/07/2003 à 16:56, Hans Deragon a écrit :

> French-canadian keyboards have special keys for generating some caracters
> with accents.  For instance, there is a key for ¨é¨.  I assume that they
> are using a different keymap for their specific keyboard.  I say assume
> because although I am french-canadian, I hate french-canadian keyboards
> and never use them.

There are several canadian keyboard layout standards. Old en, old fr and
new unified en+fr keyboard (http://externe.net/clavier-normalise/).

The new unified keyboard is a thing of beauty, but does not seem to take
on swiftly. It removed some of the old stupid azerty/qwerty differences,
and allows rational access to most of the glyphs needed for typing
modern french (I say most because it was written before iso 8859-15 and
thus forgets the Œ/œ glyph and the €).

I can tell you as a french native living in France it is much better
than french azerty. French uses éèçàùœ«» and typography/grammar rules
require use of accented capes (ÉÈÀÇÙ...). But the french standard is
still stuck in typewriter times and provides *no* direct access to
accented caps... you have to use a word processing program like word
that will auto-replace caps with accented caps when it thinks fit (ie a
lot of people can not actually write texts as they would be found in a
book, newspaper, etc)

Under unix where people want to type correct french in anything from vi
to emacs you need to either learn complex key sequences, import a
canadian keyboard and use the unified layout or use a slightly non
standard layout like fr-latin9 that will add the needed glyphs without
diverging too much from what's actually written in the keyboard commonly
found in France. It's a pity no one bothers to push a new layout for
unix users, because sold keyboards conform to an obsolete "standard"
that is painful but good enough for windows users that have a pirated
word copy sitting on their disk.

Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

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