New "International" keyboard for Windows users

[gwalla]

Since I wanted access to the entire Latin-1 repertoire of characters, I installed the "United States (International)" keymap. Unfortunately, it's sort of a pain to use, since some regular keys are defined as "dead keys" (you hit the key and then another to produce a character). The most irritating is probably the quote key, which is a dead key to

Comments

[ludwigvantx]

Cool! Of course you can also enter acute-accent vowels with AltGr + the vowel (doesn't work with y though). So AltGr + a = á, etc. I need to add more letters (like those extra Turkish letters, as well as Š/š and Ž/ž) to US-Int'l layout myself.

I also need to post the layout for my own version of Arabic-QWERTY, which also includes letters found in Farsi, and are also used by some Arabic-speakers for foreign loans containing 'p', 'g' and '(t)ch'.

[gwalla]

Yeah, this layout specifically only contains Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) characters, because that's what most IRC clients accept (well, some of them can do any charset, like xchat, but mIRC can only do Latin-1 and it's in the majority). I've also been working on a "US Unicode" keymap that allows access to most of the unaccented characters in Unicode's Latin repretoire, plus combining diacritics, and also an IPA keymap. Those are in much more of a state of flux though.

[ludwigvantx]

I've always wanted a 'Unicode keyboard'! Of course that'll mean A LOT of deadkeys. I still have to figure out all the intricacies of Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.

My wishlist:
Latin-Complete (Latin-1, Latin Extended-A, some Latin Extended B, some Latin Extended Additional)
QWERTY-type phonetic layouts of:
Greek
Cyrillic (at least Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian)
Hebrew
Arabic (I already have that)
Armenian
Georgian
Devanagari
Tamil
Hangul (Korean, that will take FOREVER since a huge syllabric codepage is involved)

I use a JAVA-based and Unicode-able IRC client called PJIRC. I used to use mIRC, but got tired of Khaled Mardam-Bey's nagscreen. He kept making me want to slap him around a bit with a large trout.

[gwalla]

Well, my "US Unicode" keyboard doesn't cover the entire Unicode repertoire by any means! It's more like "stuff from the Latin range, some useful diacritics, punctuation, and maybe some other stuff thrown in".

As for IRC, I actually use xchat, which is Unicode-capable. The problem is that mIRC isn't, either on the sending or the receiving end, and it's also the most common, so in most channels everybody pretty much has to use Latin-1 because most people will only see gibberish if Unicode is used. Mardam-Bey seems to be dead set against Unicode support for some reason, which sucks.

Suggested bug fix

[anonymous]

I (John Cowan) told the Unicode list about this keyboard, pointing out that Ctrl+] doesn't work in Telnet (it's the Telnet escape character) and got the following comment from Michael Kaplan of Trigeminal Software:

Ah, that is the first time I ever saw a use for control chars in the CTRL shift state!

But..... if you load the keyboard in MSKLC, add U+001d to the VK_OEM_6 key (which is where that bracket is), rebuilt it, and install it, then the Telnet ESC squence will work properly.

Telnet seems to be depending on some of those control characters being on the keyboard, and in particular positions (which means lots of the built-in keyboards would fail since not all of them have these definitions). I'll put this in as a bug to fix in the next version of MSKLC....

Re: Suggested bug fix

[gwalla]

Ah, thanks! I gotta try that out then.

Re: Suggested bug fix

[anonymous]

Yes, it appears that many console apps like Telnet (which do not have quite the same support as WM_KEYDOWN messages provide), are relying on the assignment of certain control characters in several of the CTRL+VK_OEM_* keystrokes. The only one I know of at the moment is Telnet (but with Telnet saying right when you open it that Ctrl+] is escape, I can hardly blame anyone for trusting that it would work. :-(

But just ignore the warning about control characters in the CTRL shift state in this situation -- since in this case you know better than MSKLC does....

MichKa [MS]
NLS Collation/Locale/Keyboard Development
Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
Windows International Division

This posting is provided "AS IS" with
no warranties, and confers no rights.

Re: Suggested bug fix

[gwalla]

Well, it works for Control-] in telnet now. However, Control-Shift-A still doesn't work. The ASCII control codes all seem to correspond to control + unshifted keys (except for Ctrl-^ and Ctrl-_). Any idea what control codes the shifted keys correspond to-the additional codes in the Latin-1 block?