Group 2 of ISO/IEC 9995-3 (which allows the support, on any national keyboard that implements it, of the full repertoire of ISO/IEC 6937, regardless of actual coding, which could be the one of Unicode, and indeed it is Unicode with the implementaion I have on my desk in Windows) has dead keys for many other accents or diacritical marks (tilde, for example, which I often use for name entries [like S�o Paulo] or even for French words borrowed from Spanish, like ca�on, or acute accent for other languages like Icelandic �sland) and other foreign letters (like German �, which has been a French ligature for "ss" used before the XIXth Century too, or Danish ��, or Icelandic �� or ��). Group 2 of ISO/IEC 9995-3 also supports the French digraph OE (�, rendered under Windows using a code that is badly transmitted in email when MIME tags are erroneous, such as what does Eudora, which I use [it makes believe that the code is that of ISO/IEC 8859-1]), and the � sign.
The best recommandation I can give for support of the Western Latin alphabet is to implement group 2 of ISO/IEC 9995-3 in addition to the national layout, in any country. Its purpose is to allow entering Latin letters that are foreign to a national layout that is also Latin (unfortunately, Vietnamese is not covered but it would imho take very few modifications to accommodate it).
Of course ISO/IEC 9995-3 is not a panacea for non-Latin scripts (it is foreign to them) and other input methods need to be used for this (the minimum could be ISO/IEC 14755, the poor man's input methods to enter all Unicode characters on any keyboard).
On an American keyboard, there is indeed no AltGr key. However there are two Alt keys, and under the hood, two scan codes are used to distinguish them (the electronics of American keyboards is the same as the one used in Europe or Canada) the right one and the left one. The right one could be specialized for Alt Gr entry (otherwise, hypothetically, a combibnation of function keys could also be used).
Alain LaBont� Project Editor, ISO/IEC 9995 series of keyboard standards (8 standards) Chair, CAC/SC35 (responsible for CAN/CSA Z243.200 Canadian keyboard standard) Qu�bec
A 16:25 2003-07-17 +0200, Keld J�rn Simonsen a �crit :
Hi Alain!
Any comments?
Keld
----- Forwarded message from Keld J�rn Simonsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----
Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 16:17:34 +0200
From: Keld J�rn Simonsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Hans Deragon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [I18n] Bug #122: US Intl keyboard mapping missing <c> with cedilla.
On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 09:18:18AM -0400, Hans Deragon wrote: > > I would recommend you use altgr-comma c instead. this is implemented on > > at least danish, swedish, norwegian an finnish keyboards for X. > > Apostrophe-c should mean C with apostrophe - and not c with cedilla. > > > > Best regards > > Keld > > There is no AltGr key on a standard US keyboard. And on usual US intl > keyboards, at least those I used on MS windows or when no locale was set > under Linux, <apostrophe> <c> generates c with cedilla. So now what? I > strongly believe that the standard is <apostrophe> <c>. Now how am I > supposed to generate a <c> cedilla on a US keyboard when no AltGr key > exist?
OK, it was only a suggestion. I am not from the US nor from Canada and French is not my native language. Anyway is there a canadian french standard for keyboards - I believe there is one? And then that would have c-cedilla in a well defined way. I will consult one of my friends who is an expert in canadian-french keyboards.
I actually was the one that generated the altgr-comma c fo c-cedilla for DK, NO, SE and FI keyboards, amongst other things for those keyboards. My impression is that people are happy with these arrangements, they even found out that I did it although it was not mentioned in the X sources. I am interested in doing some more work on it, also in the era of ISO 10646.
One of the principles in the scandinavian design was that the keys would be easy to figure out from the current standard engravings of national keyboards. And that the keyboard be consistent. I do not think that using an acute accent would be consistent with generating a cedilla letter. Acute accent should always generate letters with acute. (that would be the theory - if you never used c-acute then it may be different).
Anyway I believe c' is use in polish, croatian, serbian,
check and slovakian, which are important languages, but not as important as french.
Given that the US keyboard would be used in the US, and there are many
people either speaking french or the other languages mentioned above,
then it would be convenient if both c-cedilla and c-acute could be
generated conveniently from the standard keybord. If we want some
consistency, I would think the acute accent would be the best to
generate the acute letter. How to conveniently generate the c-cedilla is
not obvious to me, but is there another key that could be used as an
altGr?
Best regards keld
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