International (i.e. Non US) Keyboards

[PoV]

Having not been out of North America before, I have a question about international keyboards. Specifically, ones used in Germany, Spain, France and all those other fun countries that don't use the standard US style keyboard with "extended" characters (Ü, Î, Ô, etc...).

Given your standard keyboard layout, how does one normally type vowels with the symbols above them (Ü, Î, Ô) and and other special characters?

I have tried playing with my Windows XP language bar and found my tilda (~) button to activate something, and in the past I've used the old ALT+NUMPAD ascii code thang to do them, but I was curious to know what's the norm/standard across Windows, Mac's, and other (even historic) platforms.

Thanks,

[Captain Nemo]

Other countries have their own keyboard layouts, e.g. in Germany the 'ü' key is located right to 'p'.
You can find pictures of international keyboards at
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/r...keyboards.aspx

[BarrySlisk]

In denmark the letter 'Ã…' is located next to 'P'.
'Æ' nest to 'L'.
'Ø' next to 'Æ' (I think you have colon and semicolon there).

[ggambett]

We don't have physically standard keyboards. Mine is spanish. I have ñÑ right to the L. Then ', which if I press ' and then a, I get á. I have a key for ¿ and ¡ (we use opening question and exclamation marks, as in "¡Este es un ejemplo! ¿Está claro?"). We also have ç and Ç which aren't used in spanish but are used in portuguese, which I guess share the same keyboards. Other than that, we have a pretty standard keyboard.

[stan]

Azerty (french) keyboards have a key with ^ and ¨ (when shifted), that we can press before pressing a vowel in order to accentuate that letter. ç, é, è, Ã*, ù can be typed directly without pressing alt/shift. Under Windows there's no easy way to type a Ç, but under AmigaOS and MorphOS it can be typed with shift-alt-c . Same for á, ò, ñ etc., under Windows alt-<obscure keypad number> must be used, but under AmigaOS/MorphOS they can be typed with alt-f/g/h/j/k then the letter.

[Holmqvist]

The swedish keyboard looks like this:

__qwertyuiopå
___asdfghjklöä
____zxcvbnm



/ Jacob

[Fry Crayola]

German keyboards have the Y and Z swapped, too. Z is used far, far more than Y.

This caused me many headaches when I lived there. At work I had to type remember not to end up doing sillz mistakes like that. Then at home on this laptop I had to reremember to tzpe properlz.

It wasn't easy at first...

[tolik]

ё1234567890-=
йцукенгшщзххъ\
фывапролджэ
ячсмитьбю.

That's russian.