Buying International Keyboards? 56
dmayle asks: "I've been investigating the purchase of some non-US keyboards for the flexibility it would give me in correspondences (easy access to the Euro symbol, accented characters, etc.). Specifically, I've been looking at U.K. keyboards, which are still QWERTY (as opposed to the German QWERTZ, or the French AZERTY), even if some of the punctuation is placed a little differently. The problem I have is that I can't find a U.K. company willing to ship keyboards out of the U.K. So, where does the Slashdot crowd go to satisfy their internationalization need? Any favorite importers? (Not just for keyboards, but in general.)"
An excuse to visit the UK ;-) (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you tried Amazon.co.uk? The only things that they have refused to ship me are Region 2 DVDs. Admittedly, I haven't tried buying a keyboard from them.
Re:An excuse to visit the UK ;-) (Score:2)
Re:An excuse to visit the UK ;-) (Score:2)
You know... (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, I was down in Central America recently and saw that many keyboards there have at least 108 keys, some even more. (Extra keys for and such.) YMMV.
Re:You know... (Score:2)
Re:You know... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm glad you said that - I was just about to start being [dia]critical about your post.
Hidden keys (Score:2, Interesting)
There were no keycaps on the keys, but I moved a few existing keycaps to those locations. They worked, and produced unique scancodes. If I got some shorter shift/enter/... keys, and new keyc
I can't help you with that... (Score:1, Informative)
Either that, or spend a day and memorize your character map (I suspect that alt+0128 will become a best friend for you). =P
Frech-Canadian (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Frech-Canadian (Score:3, Informative)
PCKeyboard.com (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PCKeyboard.com (Score:1)
Re:PCKeyboard.com (Score:1, Interesting)
http://store.yahoo.com/pckeyboards/valueplus.html [yahoo.com]
Re:PCKeyboard.com (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:PCKeyboard.com (Score:2)
I second that notion. I've got a good ol' model M on my desk at home and I wouldn't switch to something else. The only downside is that if you type very 'hard' you'll wake up people on different floors because they will hear the sounds of the keys and feel the vibrations through the floor.
B
Re:PCKeyboard.com (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:PCKeyboard.com (Score:2)
You're looking for the Happy Hacking Keyboard [yahoo.com]. ;-)
Re:PCKeyboard.com (Score:1)
What would be cool would be some (cheap) way of having a keyboard made with your own custom key layout. Any ideas?
You don't need an international keyboard (Score:5, Informative)
Physical keyboards...say wha? (Score:1)
Here's where I go for all my keyboard layout needs:
man setxkbmapShipping is damn quick, and good prices too.
have you tried (Score:2)
Re:have you tried (Score:2)
Re:have you tried (Score:2)
Cherry (Score:3, Informative)
After 10 seconds of google searching.... (Score:2, Informative)
Looks like they have a whole passel of different languages/formats.
Enjoy!
What an odd coincidence... (Score:2, Interesting)
Up for a swap?
Re:What an odd coincidence... (Score:2, Informative)
The only differences to the US keyboard are:
Re:What an odd coincidence... (Score:2)
Having said that, with the multi (a.k.a compose) key you can easily access the pound sign, as well as yen, cents, and all the accents and other funny characters you could ever want (which I would have demonstrated, but for some reason crapdot doesn't display them).
Re:What an odd coincidence... (Score:1)
Re:What an odd coincidence... (Score:3, Informative)
On my italian keyboard [ and ] are right next to the P, but you need to use Alt-Gr to get them, as they plain keys are used for [e`] and +. I guess that either keyboards have handy brackets (and ", and #, @ etc.), like the US and UK ones, or accented letters and other diacritycals, like [n~] and the like (oh, and btw, ~ itself isn't anywhere on my keyboard, just like { and }, it is either alt+code on win or remembering the positions on linux).
I believe that the actual key layout instead is the same betwee
Easy (Score:1)
You have three alternatives. Either find a friend in the right country who is willing to ship the keyboards surface freight, or go there on vacation, or (as I did) bring a good supply of keyboards with you whe
Look up AltGr key coomnbinations (Score:3, Interesting)
AltGr+vowel combinations produce acute accented versions of the vowels.
Re:You obviously don't have a Mac (Score:1)
Re:You obviously don't have a Mac (Score:1)
I don't know about Macs but my Linux has a very intuitive way to generate special characters. Want Euro ? Type Compose (a special key, usually the Windows Menu key), then E + = (the Euro sign is basically an E crossed by an '=' sign). Everything is like that : A with grave accent ? Easy
Sun keyboards? (Score:2)
Sun keyboards are pretty good,
Re:Sun keyboards? (Score:1)
keep a good small keyboard on hand at all times! (Score:1)
bring one with you!
get this [logitech.com] bad boy, and tote it along.
since it's a playstation accessory, it's far easier to get internationally, but it's usb, so compatibility is guaranteed.
A pretty keyboard doesn't necessarily solve this (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine you want to write out Jean-Baptist Moliere's name correctly--and in all caps, to boot. Now, that first e should carry a grave accent. So do you just find a keyboard with a capital e+grave on it? Let's say that your system interprets a keypress there to mean character number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-1 (Latin1 for Western European languages) eight-bit encoding, this number is indeed a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE.
So you might appear to be all taken care of. But you aren't. Tomorrow, you decide you'd like to write "correctly" the famous name of the inventor of robots, Karel Capek [misto.cz] (aka Karla Capka [misto.cz]). That C there should carry a caron, because it's not pronounced "Kapka", but "Chapka". So you go find yourself a Czech keyboard, and lo and behold, it has the proper character!
Are you set? Not at all; to the contrary, now you're I in trouble. Because you might well find that the character generated by that key, as recognized by your computer, is also number 0xC8. In the ISO 8859-2 (Latin2 for Eastern European languages) eight-bit encoding, that same 0xC8 is now taken to mean a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON.
See the problem? If you look at Karel's name in your trusty Latin1 locale, it will be screwed up, and if you look at Jean-Baptist's under a Latin2 locale, then it will be screwed up. You can't win.
Now, as for the Euro symbol, you're going to have even more (none-)fun, because you aren't going to find a suitable ISO eight-bit encoding that includes it. The 8859's just aren't going to do it for you.
Of course, were this but in ISO 10646 (that is, in Unicode [unicode.org]), these particular problems do go away. There, the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH GRAVE is at U+C8 (yes, really; the same as in Latin1), but the LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CARON is at U+10C, a completely distinct numeric code point. This is as it should be, since those really are different glyphs, so they shouldn't share the same numeric representation. On the matter of the Euro for your keyboard, under Unicode, you've even got EURO SIGN sitting there at U+20AC for you.
Even if you tried to go this route, I suspect that you're probably just exchanging one set of problems with another. After all, how well is your system truly set up for you to use Unicode? Can it map keyboard events into appropriate code points? And what about the tools you're using? What are you going to do with it once you have it? Consider the multiplicity of external encodings for the same code points, such as for disk storage, network transfers, etc, that you find in UTF-8, UTF16-LE, etc.
So, I don't think there are answers to the submitter's query that are at all so simple as others have presented the matter here. For the curious, here's a good reference on the mess we're in now, called appropriately enough, ISO Alphabet Soups [czyborra.com].
--tom
Re:A pretty keyboard doesn't necessarily solve thi (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, but I have to disagree here : the ISO-8859-15 (latin0) has the EuroSign at offset 0xA4 (IIRC this position was occupied in ISO-8859-1 by a rather unused character, I think it was the 1/2 but I'm too lazy to check). Most if not all West European Linux users already have switched to ISO-8859-15.
Re:A pretty keyboard doesn't necessarily solve thi (Score:2)
Oh, and did I mention it doesn't support the copyleft symbol. It has the entire klingon, ancient egyptian, ancient norse, and elvish alphabets, but no copyleft symbol.
Cheap Chinese keyboard here (Score:2)
French Canadian Keyboard (Score:2)
Print a layout (Score:1)
Brasilian Keyboard (Score:1)
Cheapass Alternative (Score:1)