Foreign Character Keyboards
At our weekly BSAPM meeting today, Peter mentioned that our Personnel department are stuggling entering all the weird and wonderful non-english characters that feature in people's names these days.... not surprising given we've 16 offices world wide, but hey.....
We pondered the existence of a specially built keyboard which features keys for all the standard accented letters (they must have a name but it's 6.45 and fishy beers await me at the Toucan if i get there soon!).
One quick google later ("Foreign Character keyboards") and I found Vance's ESL_Home: Foreign Languages besides English on the Web.
Scrolling down to the bottom brings you to three likely candidates, all quite old, with Number 3 looking like it might be what Personnel are after.
"A relatively simple way to get diacritical marks on letters, which makes it possible to type - or - is to set your keyboard to International. There are instructions on how to set up this keyboard (and other non-US-standard keyboards) in Win95 at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~mittenth/flbrowse.html#yourpc (Link no longer works) - 30 Mar 1999, Laurel Mittenthal posting on calico-l
"The following URL: http://jimmy.com/Software/KeyMapPro2/index.html gives access to GIF images of the following 56 PC Language Keyboard Layouts. Russian and other Slav languages are perhaps the most obvious omissions from the list." - 30 Mar 1999 David Wilson calico-l
"FingerTip software (http://cyrillic.com/index.html) has a neat program called 3-D Keyboard that allows you to reconfigure the keyboard as you wish, including using Western characters. You can download an evaluation copy that runs for 45 days. It will work with all programs in Windows 3.1, 95, 97, 98. The program costs $25." - 30 Mar 1999 Eugene F. Gray on calico-l
All come from calico-l, but I'd no idea what that is/was! Googling "calico-l" gave the answer: "CALICO-L e-mail discussion list is an open forum of the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium. " So know you know.
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