Here you'll find a tentative French-based Pan-Sahelian keyboard layout. - in Excel format: http://www.rodage.org/pub/French-Sahel.xls - as a PDF snapshot: http://www.rodage.org/pub/French-Sahel.pdf
The layout uses AltGr and AltGr+Shift maps for non-African characters and it supports most of the European languages, with which Pan-Sahelian languages are used. The layout is fully compatible with an existing French keyboard layout (yes it has the Euro, and all French AltGr keys), to minimize the cost of building such keyboards, which could be distributed as a low-cost plate of plastic stickers to put on an existing French keyboard. It uses an "Afr" deadkey which can be entered prior to the African characters entered without the AltGr key. Some keyboards support a "Fn" key which could be used as a modifier (working like a second AltGr key). Two snapshots are displayed: - one simplified to just display the important characters in the AltGr and Afr maps. When a character has both a lowercase and uppercase version, only the lowercase is displayed centered vertically. This enhances the readability/usability of the keyboard (exactly like on classic keyboards where lowercase unaccented letters are showing only the uppercase version aligned vertically on the top). - the second snapshot shows the complete assignments. Unused positions are shown with a dark grey background. Some African keys are shown on a redish background (in the Excel version) for characters which must be composed in Unicode, and are still approximative and possibly candidates for addition in the Unicode standard. These keys cause problems for now, as it is not clear how these letters will be encoded in Unicode: as a combining sequence? The most problematic characters are those African letters with hooks. I'd like suggestions about these missing characters (sometimes only the lowercase letter is assigned not the uppercase one)...
