Ohh this resounds a quite familar (and long-standing) nuisance.
Firstly though: the right-ALT *does* work on recently made keyboards,
only it's the *video*-charset driver (not even the keyboard one) which
makes for additional problems.
The way out of the miseria (or at least a work-around) is perhaps
easier with controlling the charsets with import/export of files. As
keyboard drivers (yet) do not allow for direct output of UNICODE (ie.,
the reduced 16-bit charset of the future standard of a 32-bit real
universal character set, UCS), remapping a file's charset - either
before sending it out, or before importing it in to "locally" used
programs for treatment - is quite straightforward. This can be done
even with simple macros; eg., I know that a sequence of "L:/" in my
(usually German) texts signifies a symbol for the barred Polish L
"imported" into the editor which doesn't exist in the used
IBM/CodePage_437 set.
With writing, I use a set of otherwise rarely used 8-bit char.s (after
all, it's only a small number of one or two dozen specific letters which
are specific for most of the European languages) and then remap these to
the correct charset used on the receiving end.
[For non-direct transfer, via email for instance, a remapping to MIME-
Quoted Printable must be done *before* sending, as the mailers and/or
the ISPs promptly use Wim$ic charsets, with idiot results - or outright
destructive consequences.]
The problem with those dang keyboard and video drivers is rather to make
the boot controllable. I had a hards time with the recently acquired
laptop to make it drop the wrong charset it insisted to (hidden,
Win$-)load with the VGA driver and to have it accept the - indeed
"native" - IBM-set/CP437 instead (which, btw, has even a much larger
range of various European chars than the "European" ISO-8859-1). Then,
the (equivalent to) the right-ALT key does work indeed.
The other way round, like in the example given - to reconstruct
non-"native" char.s in a charset with the ANSI driver for instance -
seems a rather rough road. Or, like in the German saying, trying to go
with the head through a brick wall.
// Heimo Claasen // <hammer at revobild dot net> // Brussels 2000-11-11
The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.inti.be/hammer
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