I am in Canada and my keyboard driver is US/English --- As explained I was okay with characters in OpenOffice Writer for a period of time and Then suddenly it switched over to the " mark !!!! In all other software appl. It's okay -- @@@@@@@@ I've tried your suggestion 'Alt & Shift' ---no change ! I will give your advice further attention aft weekend --- Thanks so much !!!!
-------Original Message------- From: Brian Barker Date: 10/08/2007 4:54:08 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [users] Keyboard issue At 14:12 10/08/2007 -0700, Maggie Egresits wrote: >I have a frustrating situation with the 'Writer' ---- > >After typing a half page of E-mail addresses and need for '@' , this >character suddenly not available but rather got a " (quotation mark) > >Same scenario with '#' character -got a / (slash) > >Remainder of characters on number keys seem to be accurate. > >What is wrong and how do I correct this????? > >As you see I am not having this issue with other applications . This is actually an operating system problem, despite appearances. I'm guessing from your mail client that you are using Windows. Problems like this are produced by having the wrong keyboard driver selected. The keyboard driver knows where the keys are on the keyboard and translates the hardware signals (which effectively say where the key was that was pressed) to the appropriate character. Since there are very many keyboard layouts in use around the world, different keyboard drivers are necessary to achieve this. What you describe is consistent with your having a UK/Ireland keyboard. Is this what you have? If so, you have probably changed the keyboard driver to the US one, which has some keys in different positions - just as you have described. (There are other possibilities.) So how did this happen? Well, if you have more than one language setting in your regional options, you can toggle between them by pressing Alt+Shift. No-one knows this, and so anyone who hits this combination by mistake doesn't know what they have done, how they did it, or - still worse - how to undo it! Oh, and it doesn't help that the task bar codes for these two keyboard drivers are *both* "EN", so there is no clue there to what has happened, either! In fact, Alt+Shift again should sort you out in a flash. If you change keyboard driver in midstream, as it were, the change applies only to the application in focus, which is what you say happened. There is a better solution. Installing Windows creates a US keyboard entry in the regional options by default. If you have another keyboard, you need to add that. But most people leave the two language entries, with the one they need as default. That leaves you open to exactly this problem. You can avoid it totally by removing whichever language or keyboard entry you don't need. (You can just as easily recover it later if you need to.) I trust this helps. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
