I recently received a question regarding typing in French and thought I would repost Heman’s message about this issue FYI.
Tara
Hi all,
We’ve had a few patrons expressing their disappointment that our WOPAC’s language bar included English, Chinese, Korean & Japanese support but no French settings.
We did not install “French (Canada)” on the language bar because it is a keyboard mapper – unless we purchase French keyboards (eg: from Quebec…), choosing “French (Canada)” on the language bar would result in mismapped keys, ie: wrong characters showing up on screen as you type.
However, the case with Chinese, Japanese and Korean settings are very different – they are actually a host of utilities that facilitate CJK character input, which include handwriting recognition (see attached screenshot), on screen “soft keyboards”, as well as phonics based input methods. Without them CJK input would not be possible, say, for searching CJK materials.
Having said that, their point is taken and we will include “French (Canada)” in the language bar on our future builds. Hopefully it will benefit francophone touch typists that *remembered* the French keyboard layout. In the mean time, people that need access to diacritics, euros, pounds can use the “Character map” utility under [Start] – [Programs] – [Accessories]. This utility will also tell you the keystrokes required to get to these characters directly, for example to get to an “é”, just hold the [ALT] key while typing 0233 on the numeric keypad (works with most applications) (see attached screenshot).
Hope this helps,
Heman.
February 9th, 2009 by Susan Atkey | No Comments »
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