Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT sources DOT redhat DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT sources DOT redhat DOT com From: hsrodgers AT UCLAlumni DOT net Message-Id: <4.2.2.20000716120756.00a26440@mail.earthlink.net> X-Sender: hsrodgers AT mail DOT earthlink DOT net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.2 Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 12:09:20 -0700 To: cygwin AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com Subject: Other languages - secondarily Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by delorie.com id PAA27395 I'm tired of having Windoze mess up and am about ready to give Linux a try. But first I need to know if there is a way for me to type in other languages (mainly Romance languages) besides English - without having to mess up my keyboard layout. I can do that with WordPerfect (DOS) version 5.1+. So I'm looking for a way to do the same in Windows 98 and/or Linux.. Here is my plea: Foreign language keyboard layouts are fine - in the countries that need them. But they are next to worthless for us here in the U.S. when we need to write in another language, secondarily - too many keys are changed - not even @ for e-mail anywhere on the keyboard. The Spanish key layout is close to ours, would serve very well for writing French too - but it's enough different from ours to be of practical value. What is needed is for a good programmer to set up a key arrangement that is the same as ours but that can produce the diacritical symbols other languages require - by means of "dead" keys. Dead keys, the two keys at the right of the P, the bracket keys, can serve very well for that function as they don't normally get much action. Keyb Sp in the old PC/MS-DOS days made use of them to supply acute, grave, dieresis, and circumflex symbols - easily and quickly. There is no reason why they couldn't be made to do the same for us in the U.S. now - and also supply the tilde for ñ, the upside down ¿ and ¡ Spanish needs as well as ç for French and Portuguese, and the European «quotes» for all those languages that use them. All without messing up our key arrangement - everything printed on the keytop would produce exactly that when struck . (The bracket keys would just have be to struck twice). Some languages might require an additional key to work as a dead key, but even Turkish with their I and i with and without dots, their G and S, with diacritics added, can be arranged via the same bracket keys. I've done it - via WordPerfect's .WPK and macros. But it only works in WP Dos versions 5.x. I can type in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish without aborting my normal typing rhythm and darn near as fast as in English, thanks to the dead-key operation, which involves sequential keystrokes instead of having to press two or three keys at the same time, to say nothing of trying to use a foreign key layout. But I'm not a programmer, and it would take a good one to create the same sort of keyboard arrangement for Windows, DOS, OS/2, or Linux, or . . . . Any ideas? «Howard» -- Want to unsubscribe from this list? Send a message to cygwin-unsubscribe AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com