Oh wow. Well, the range of different keyboard layouts I see around me is something else! (Especially on laptops).
Now here's something weird. Just about every standard, fully-size, desktop, (British) QWERTY keyboard I have ever seen, has the legend for U+00A6 BROKEN BAR as the shifted symbol printed on the key to the immediate left of Z (with the unshifted symbol being backslash), and the legend for U+007C VERTICAL LINE as the third symbol printed on the key to the immediate left of 1 (with the unshifted and shifted symbols being backquote (U+0060, officially GRAVE ACCENT) and the aforementioned "not sign" (U+00AC) respectively). Thus, you would expect <shift + backslash> to yeild BROKEN BAR, and you would expect <alt-gr + backquote> to yield VERTICAL LINE, because that's what printed on the keys.
On the Mac, the situation is a bit different. On older keyboards, the grave/tilde `~ key was to the left of the 1; on newer ones, that key is to the left of the Z, and to the left of the 1 is the section/plus-minus �� key. Then on the other side of the keyboard, older keyboards had the backslash/vertical-bar key to the right of the equals-sign; newer keyboards have this key to the right of the apostrophe key.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
