Canadian Keyboards

[+sTeamTraen]

I hope the moderator will indulge me for a day or so...

 

For obscure reasons, I need to get someone a "Canadian French" PC keyboard. I've already bought KBs called "Canadian" in the past, although none called (explicitly) "Canadian French".

 

If you have a minute, I would like to know how your keyboard is laid out:

 

- QWERTY or AZERTY ? (French-France KBs are AZERTY)

- What is on the key two places to the right of the "L" ?

- Which other character(s) are printed on the "2" (on the main keyboard, not the numeric pad) ?

 

If anyone in Québec could help, that would be even better.

 

Thanks

Nick

[+The red-haired witch]

I am in Quebec and I do have a french keyboard right now (or it might be a bilingual keyboard..), but I have to tell you that the "french-canadian" keyboards are not all identical, I`ve owned several differently designed ones. The most important thing is :

 

QWERTY, always. Someone who is not from Europe will have lots of trouble with the other kind.

 

There should be at least keys with é, `, ^, ¸ and ¨. Some keyboards have more keys, so they have distinct ones for à and è, but that is not essential.

 

As for your specific questions, the keyboard I have right now has ' " `` two left from L, and @ " above the 2.

[+Geofellas]

I have a Canadian French keyboard and I love it as I can type all kinds of accented charaters easily - best of all it has a ° key (this is the bit that keeps it "on topic" for this forum )

 

There is an official Windows Canadian French layout and you can configure Windows to use it easily enough

 

AFAIK you can't buy these in stores outside Québec - I bought mine in Montréal when I was on a visit there.

 

You can buy them online - see here or here for example

 

It takes a bit of getting used to if you are familiar with the US English layout but I got very comfortable with it in about a week or so. I do occasionally have problems remembering where some of the more unusual characters are when I take my laptop away and have to use the US English keyboard built into the laptop as though it were a Canadian French layout without the benefit of the symbols being printed on the keys but I usually manage.

 

Here is the Microsoft Canadian French Keyboard Layout chart

 

You can also find more info, including where to buy overlays, from this google search

Edited April 13, 2005 by Geofellas

[+sTeamTraen]

Thanks. It sounds like the two of you have the same. We ordered one of those about four years back but it wasn't what we wanted.

 

Then I found this layout and got 6 of them; our English-language typists who also type a lot of French, love them!

 

The major French accented characters (éèàçù) are all on their own keys, and you can Shift- any of them for a capital. In France it's rare to keep the accent on an upper-case letter, except sometimes É, but it's nice to be able to. And did you know that on a regular French keyboard there is no way to have an upper-case Ç ? (Consider starting a sentence with "Ça va faire...".) Here it's just Shift-ç.

 

So anyway, I run the PCs in a big international organisation, and we will get people any KB they want, if it exists. One of our users is trying to convince us that there's a "French Canadian" keyboard with an AZERTY layout. I think she probably means the one which you two have, which is convenient, as I've had one in stock for four years...

[+Couparangus]

Here's a stupid question from someone who hasn't read the manual of his computer. In the days of DOS you used to be able to get at the special characters by holding down the ALT key and hitting the corresponding ASCII code for the character. For instance I used to use the "omega" symbol a lot and would go ALT-234 and it would appear. Same for "approx equal to" which was ALT-240. On Windows I know you can get at these by going: Start=>Programs=>Accessories=>System Tools=>Character Map (and then hunting them down). Is there an easier way?!?! Can I programme my keyboard and turn say ALT-SHIFT-D into the degress symbol etc?

 

I don't think I'm quite ready for a French Canadian keyboard. I know only enough French to get my face slapped.

 

Cheers!

Coupar Angus

[+Hard Oiler]

Here's a stupid question from someone who hasn't read the manual of his computer. In the days of DOS you used to be able to get at the special characters by holding down the ALT key and hitting the corresponding ASCII code for the character. For instance I used to use the "omega" symbol a lot and would go ALT-234 and it would appear. Same for "approx equal to" which was ALT-240. On Windows I know you can get at these by going: Start=>Programs=>Accessories=>System Tools=>Character Map (and then hunting them down). Is there an easier way?!?! Can I programme my keyboard and turn say ALT-SHIFT-D into the degress symbol etc?

 

I don't think I'm quite ready for a French Canadian keyboard. I know only enough French to get my face slapped.

 

Cheers!

Coupar Angus

You can install the English International Keyboard (it's under Control Panel, Regional and Language Options Lnaguages tab, Text services and Input languages, details, and Add the US International Keyboard and change it to the default on starting up.)

 

That gives you all kinds of special character options - shift, right alt, : is ° . Also makes things like £, €, á easy to do.

 

You can find a chart Here

 

Even with the default basic English keyboard layout Alt 0176 will give you °

Edited April 14, 2005 by Hard Oiler

[+sTeamTraen]

The French-Canadian KB has a lot of "dead keys", which are basically accents which you hit - nothing happens - followed by a real character, and you get the second character with the accent on it.

 

If you have a plain vanilla US keyboard, download AllChars from www.allchars.net. It's a brilliant piece of freeware which lets you build any character up in a mnemonic way. For example, e and ' gives you é, s and s gives you a German ß, etc. It works with every application I have ever seen (except "The Sims"), and you can also program your favourite strings into macros (handy when writing "Zbigniew Brzezinski" 20 times a day) which are, again, available in any application: not just Word (or whatever), but also Notepad, Lotus, PhotoShop, etc.

 

Nick