On 12/14/2014 12:10 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Sun, 2014-12-14 at 23:22 +1030, Tim wrote:
On Sun, 2014-12-14 at 12:21 +0000, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
You can avoid the special Compose key by an appropriate keyboard
selection that supports dead keys. I use UK International so to type
á
I hit ' and a. Similarly ñ is ~ and n, and so on. This is under KDE
but I assume the same thing would work with Gnome.
I'd tried that in the past, but then it made it horrible to type in
normal punctuation. Commas, apostrophes, etc., had to be typed twice,
to get them to appear. I use them, a lot, and having to do that was
horrid.
I have a little layout button in the KDE panel that can easily switch
dead keys on and off. IOW the keyboard is essentially modal. You can
also define a key combo to do the same thing. I much prefer this to the
Compose key method as I frequently type long pieces of text in Spanish
and having to hit the Compose key all the time gets old really fast. I'm
not unaware of the double-key issue (I even have to use it when typing
my own name :-) but I've just become used to it. In fact I type dead-key
followed by spacebar to get the desired effect, which is really easy.
It's about damn time that a proper international keyboard was brought
out, to supersede querty. One where all the usual accents, and extra
punctuation, are on their keys (such as where the, usually, useless F
keys are).
Can't see that happening any time soon. When you've tried to use a
European (non-English) keyboard and can't find @ or \ or $ (random
examples only) you see how complex this could be. Look at the keyboards
for some Asian languages.
poc
I don't know if it's possible to reprogram the function keys, but
I would guess they get very little use, so it would be easy to put
the desired characters on the F keys. You would make a separate F-key
program for each language.
Spanish has three accented vowels, and ñ, so with upper and lower case,
that's 8 keys. I think Spanish also uses ç so 10. Add the ¿ and ¡ you
have 12.
Italian has four vowels with accents, but they go both ways, so you
would run out of F keys! Best would probably be to just use the F keys
for lower case, so you would only need 8.
French has three vowels with two diacrits (forward accent plus ^) and ç
so with upper and lower case each, that's 14, unless one of the diacrits
is not used with certain vowels. (I don't know French, so I don't know
if there are some vowels that don't take the ^ , for instance.) No
complete answer for the F keys! Maybe do like Italian.
German has three vowels with umlauts and the ess-tset (ß) character. Eight,
if there is a "capital" ess-tset. (I haven't seen one in Compose. I think you
can use the lower case ß even in all up-case headings.)
I think languages like Polish are beyond this kind of solution!
--doug
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