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The Almighty Buck

Buying International Keyboards? 56

Posted by Cliff from the not-everything-is-QWERTY dept.
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.)"
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Buying International Keyboards? More

Buying International Keyboards?

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  • An excuse to visit the UK ;-) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by leastsquares ( 39359 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:55PM (#6725565) Homepage
    I bought my UK keyboard in the UK and brought it back to the US with me. That probably isn't very helpful but...

    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.

  • You know... (Score:5, Informative)

    by andfarm ( 534655 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @03:56PM (#6725578)
    you can change the keyboard layout to -- say -- the UK layout without having a UK keyboard, since, IIRC, UK users have 104 keyboards just like us, except with different key caps.

    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.

    • Ulch, Slashdot ate my diacriticals. I meant to say "Extra keys for [n~] and such."

    • Hidden keys (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I recently removed the keycaps while cleaning my Keytronics keyboard, and found some spots where extra keys could be installed. An extra key was hidden under each shift, one under the Enter key, at least one on the numeric keypad (under the larger keys), and one under backspace, IIRC - this results in at least 108 keys.

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...but perhaps you could create a small text file with all of the commonly used alternate characters? Then, it simply becomes a matter of copying and pasting what you want when you want it.

    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)

    by Sepper ( 524857 )
    Try a French-canadian one. It's a good compromise and still remains QWERTY. Not that it has any EURO symbol though, but it's closer to the US.

    • Re:Frech-Canadian (Score:3, Informative)

      by wsapplegate ( 210233 )
      I second this proposal : the Canadian Normalized Keyboard has a huge lot of symbols, including accented capitals, french guillemots, and other useful digraphs like Spanish punctuation, copyright/divide/multiply/etc. symbols, and so on (sorry I can't show them, the lameness filter has apparently decided that showing characters is lame :-)... Sure, you can get all this with your Compose key if you're an Unix guy, or with Alt and a good understanding of the ASCII table if you're a Microserf :-) But it's a lot

  • PCKeyboard.com (Score:5, Informative)

    by Momomoto ( 118483 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @04:01PM (#6725645) Homepage
    PCKeyboard.com [pckeyboard.com] stocks non-USA keyboards [yahoo.com] in five flavours: French, German, Latin American, Spanish, and UK. They're $79 a pop, but they're built like tanks and will last longer than your computer.

    • Nice, but a bit out of my price range. Anyone know where I can get a vanilla 'classic 101 key' keyboard, straight enter key, home/ins/del and arrow keys in the right places, no meta keys for $10?

      • Re:PCKeyboard.com (Score:1, Interesting)

        by apoc.famine ( 621563 )
        Aaaah...in true /. style I answered my own question by RTFAing. Their ValuePlus keyboard looks to be exactly what I'm looking for...although they are out of straight ps/2 ones and are selling AT with PS/2 adapter.

        http://store.yahoo.com/pckeyboards/valueplus.html [yahoo.com]
      • I bought my Model M at a thrift store for $2 Canadian. It weighs 6 pounds and was produced in 1984. No crummy Windows key of course. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. I'll never go back to another keyboard.
        • "I bought my Model M at a thrift store for $2 Canadian. It weighs 6 pounds and was produced in 1984. No crummy Windows key of course. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking. I'll never go back to another keyboard."

          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)

      by nickos ( 91443 )
      Ooh, look at that "Linux 101" keyboard [yahoo.com] with the Ctrl, Caps-Lock and Esc keys in the right places. They have two layouts, 1 [pckeyboard.com] and 2 [pckeyboard.com]. Layout 2 looks better to me.
      • "Ooh, look at that "Linux 101" keyboard with the Ctrl, Caps-Lock and Esc keys in the right places."

        You're looking for the Happy Hacking Keyboard [yahoo.com]. ;-)

        • Nope, afraid not. It's size and simplicity makes it very appealing, but I think I want those extra keys. I don't like the position/size of the cursor keys on the HH2, and would miss the Home/End/PageUp/PageDown, function and numeric (for NetHack and FreeCiv etc) keys.

          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)

    by prostoalex ( 308614 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @04:01PM (#6725646) Homepage Journal
    You need international stickers [overture.com] that you can put on your own keyboard. For Windows you need Keyboard Layout Manager [freeservers.com] to set up your own layouts from whatever alphabets you have on your machine. For Linux I think there's XMaps, but I might be wrong.

  • Here's where I go for all my keyboard layout needs:

    man setxkbmap

    Shipping is damn quick, and good prices too.

      • Interestingly, I found a keyboard for my gateway solo 2500 (laptop) for 12.95 usd on ebay, only thing with it is the under the english there are hebrew letters. Two things, one it is a conversation starter, two it was cheaper than the english list price of like 70 usd. So you may end up paying really rock-bottom prices for your international keyboard.

  • Cherry (Score:3, Informative)

    by mcgroarty ( 633843 ) <brian DOT mcgroarty AT gmail DOT com> on Monday August 18, 2003 @04:08PM (#6725740) Homepage
    Cherry [cherrycorp.com] makes keyboards for all major layouts and can refer you to companies that ship internationally. They also have (or had) a pack available with all of the five or six major layouts in one bundle -- this is commonly purchased by test labs who need to make sure Windows apps will work on each.
  • http://www.worldlanguage.com/ProductTypes/Keyboard s.htm

    Looks like they have a whole passel of different languages/formats.

    Enjoy!
  • I've been looking for a US keyboard myself given that european keyboards aren't as programmer-friendly. To get {[]} you need to press Alt-Gray + 7, 8, 9, 0, the "quote" symbol is shift 2, you can really tell that programming languages were created in america, and made for american keyboards. I dont know who the heck came up with these crappy international layouts... i've switched to american layout for the past couple of months and found it most productive.
    Up for a swap?
    • Don't know what "European" keyboard you've got, but my UK keyboard has '[' and ']' right next to the 'P' key.

      The only differences to the US keyboard are:
      • The GBP symbol (which slashdot strips out of postings) instead of '#' on the number 4.
      • '@' and '"' have swapped places.
      • Backslash gets moved to the left of the 'Z' key and the Shift button is smaller
      • The Enter button is tall and thin, since there's no backslash button above it, and a new '#' key next to it.
      • I think you're forgetting that the UK isn't really part of Europe, or at least it won't be if some people have their way.

        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).

      • 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

  • The first time I ever saw a Hungarian keyboard I made a mental note never ever to use one again. Only the 'Z' and 'Y' are swapped in the letters but everything else is all over the place. I once spent ten minutes in a Budapest internet cafe trying to find the '@' symbol so that I could send an e-mail.

    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)

    by belroth ( 103586 ) on Monday August 18, 2003 @05:15PM (#6726392)
    It might be easier to look up the AltGr key combinations that apply to your keyboard, for example on a UK keyboard the Euro symbol is produced by AltGr+4, according to this microsoft site [microsoft.com] on a US international keyboard it should be AltGr+5.
    AltGr+vowel combinations produce acute accented versions of the vowels.
  • I know Sun sell a variety of country kits, including keyboards which are now USB (make sure you get a type 6 which is the USB one). Dunno if they'll sell a UK country kit in the US, though, but their store [sun.com] suggests they do: go to spare parts, choose for workstation/Sunblade 100 & go to Input devices; the country kits come in at $60 including keyboard, mouse & mouse mat + some other odds & ends; might even include an ethernet cable, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

    Sun keyboards are pretty good,

    • You can also purchase an IBM UK keyboard from IBM. Browse to http://www.pc.ibm.com/uk/accessories/ and find the part number for the accessory you are after (31P7450 is the part number for a black 104 key keyboard), and order it from 1-888-SHOP-IBM (their US based online shop does not stock UK parts). The approx retail price for the keyboard is about #28.00 (~US$45) or so.

  • 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.

  • I hope you realize that you can paste all the happy stickers on your keys that you want, or even get all the keyboards with exactly those glyphs that you want already on them, yet still find yourself with nothing usable. What precisely are the codes being delivered by those keys, and how exactly will your system interpret such codes?

    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

    • > 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.

      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.
    • Some say (article: [debian.org]) that Unicode isn't as suitable for multi-lingual use as the hype claims it to be, for example, munging different glyphs into the same code which mean you can use it for chinese or for japanese but not both without it looking weird. 16 bits apparently is too small to represent everything they want to represent.

      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.
  • I recently bought and assembled a computer for my dad, and was surprised to see that NewEgg had a Chinese keyboard [newegg.com] for $7. Since my dad's Chinese, I got it for him... I doubt if he'll actually use it to type Chinese, but if he ever wants to, he can.
  • I highly recommend a French Canadian keyboard. (It's not the same as a French keyboard, btw.) It's very close to the U.S. keyboard (QWERTY and all, and none of that funny stuff on the numeric line), and you get most accents at your fingertips. It's useful even when typing English, especially for words like facade, resume etc. Or even if you need a degree mark &#176;;, you have it on the keyboard, because the French word for number is Numero, and is abbreviated N&#176;. (an abbreviation that English
  • I learned the Dvorak key layout simply by having a printed sheet of paper next to my keyboard. Proper typing technique doesn't have you looking at your hands anyway.
  • Hehehe i know what ure saying man.. i have an US keyboard in home and here in work i have a brasilian ABNT2 one. im brasilian. they are preety much the same, the only thing is that brasilian abnt2 has theese extra keys ==> '`c^~"' == ya americans would no prob use the c but the other are pretty usefull. if u are interested in a keyboard with the euro simbol, try a portuguese from portugal one. they look a lot with brasilian ones but have some diferent keys, that include euro.
  • Go HERE [hitechcafe.com] and look around, specifically under Bargain Bin. At one point, they had a metric buttload of SGI international and domestic (US) USB keyboards cheep..... Slimmer pickins now, but you should still be able to scratch your itch.

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