Text 25704, 53 rader
Skriven 2009-01-07 13:01:47 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Keyboards
=================
Hello Robert,

On Saturday January 03 2009 19:13, you wrote to me:

 RB> If you have to, you can type German (with Umlauts) on a US-Anmerican
 RB> keyboard. But it's easier on a Germn keyboard.

Of course. But it is not all that hard on a US keyboard either. I do it all the
time.. ;-)

Rhere have actually been *Dutch* keyboards. They had a key for the ligature
'ij'. AFAIK, the ligature 'ij' is only used in Dutch. It takes the place of the
'Y' in the Dutch Alphabet. The 'Y' is not part of the Dutch alphabet.

In ISO 646 NL it takes the place of left bracket. In unicode it is U+0132 for
the upper case ad u+0133 for the lower case.

But the ligature 'ij' can not be found in any of the MS-DOS codepages and that
may be the reason one hardly sees these Dutch keybaords, and the de facto
convention appears to be to just write it as the two characters 'i' and 'j'.

This leads to the curiosity that where an upper case is required, the proper
way to represent it is: 'IJ'. Two uppers case characters in succession. But
many write it as 'Ij'.

 MV>> most notible difference is that on yours the keys between the L,
 MV>> the P end the enter key, are decicated to the Umluats. The price
 MV>> you pay is that you have to use the Alt Gr key for the square and
 MV>> curly brackets, the ampersand and the backslash. On my keyboard
 MV>> they have keys of their own.

 RB> Depends on what characters are used most in a specific language, I
 RB> gues.

And how much "push" the language has. The Dutch market may be too small for
keyboards manufacturers to be interesting. Or maybe the Dutch do not want to
pay the extra price for a Dutch Keyboard. Anyway, "everyone" here uses US
keyboards. But often with a driver that allow typing accents, umpauts ana
carats with the ' " and ^ keys.

 MV>> I also note that you have keys labelled with the superscript 2 and
 MV>> 3. The only thing in which it differs from modern keyboards are
 MV>> the three "windows keys" in the bottom row.

 RB> Which I HATE. That's why I use an old keyboard without the Windows
 RB> garbage.

Why? They are not in the way are they?

Cheers, Michiel

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