Other languages - secondarily

[Chris Faylor]

On Sun, Jul 16, 2000 at 12:09:20PM -0700, hsrodgers@UCLAlumni.net wrote:
>      I'm tired of having Windoze mess up and am about ready to give Linux 
>a try.  But first I need to know if there is a way for me to type in other 
>languages (mainly Romance languages) besides English - without having to 
>mess up my keyboard layout.  I can do that with WordPerfect (DOS) version 
>5.1+.  So I'm looking for a way to do the same in Windows 98 and/or 
>Linux..  Here is my plea:
>	Foreign language keyboard layouts are fine - in the countries that need 
>them.  But they are next to worthless for us here in the U.S. when we need 
>to write in another language, secondarily - too many keys are changed - not 
>even @ for e-mail anywhere on the keyboard.
>	The Spanish key layout is close to ours, would serve very well for writing 
>French too - but it's enough different from ours to be of practical value.
>	What is needed is for a good programmer to set up a key arrangement that 
>is the same as ours but that can produce the diacritical symbols other 
>languages require - by means of "dead" keys.  Dead keys, the two keys at 
>the right of the P, the bracket keys, can serve very well for that function 
>as they don't normally get much action.  Keyb Sp in the old PC/MS-DOS days 
>made use of them to supply acute, grave, dieresis, and circumflex symbols - 
>easily and quickly.  There is no reason why they couldn't be made to do the 
>same for us in the U.S. now - and also supply the tilde for ñ, the upside 
>down ¿ and ¡ Spanish needs as well as ç for French and Portuguese, and the 
>European «quotes» for all those languages that use them.  All without 
>messing up our key arrangement - everything printed on the keytop would 
>produce exactly that when struck . (The bracket keys would just have be to 
>struck twice).
>	Some languages might require an additional key to work as a dead key, but 
>even Turkish with their I and  i with and without dots, their G  and  S, 
>with diacritics added, can be arranged via the same bracket keys.
>	I've done it - via WordPerfect's .WPK and macros.  But it only works in WP 
>Dos versions 5.x.  I can type in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and 
>Turkish without aborting my normal typing rhythm and darn near as fast as 
>in English, thanks to the dead-key operation, which involves sequential 
>keystrokes instead of having to press two or three keys at the same time, 
>to say nothing of trying to use a foreign key layout.
>	But I'm not a programmer, and it would take a good one to create the same 
>sort of keyboard arrangement for Windows, DOS, OS/2, or Linux, or . . . .
>     Any ideas?

Does this have something to do with Cygwin?  I don't really see how it does.

Why not check out exactly what is available for Linux and, then, send similar
email to a Linux mailing list?

cgf

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