QWERTY and accents
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The QWERTY keyboard layout is designed for English, a language without any accents. More and more people having to work in countries where computers are sold with the QWERTY keyboards, and consequently meet issues when having to type an accent. Until recently, no norm was defined for a compliant QWERTY keyboard layout allowing the typing of accented characters, apart from the US-International layout.
Depending on the operating system, there are nonetheless many possibilities for typing latin characters with accents.
[edit] US-International Layout
The US-International layout is a QWERTY layout, slightly modified for allowing an easy access to latin characters with accents or more generally diacritic characters. The punctuation characters ' (simple quote), " (double quote]), ` (back quote), ^ (circumflex) have a different behavior compared to the usual QWERTY layout because they are dead keys. The new user will be surprised when wishing to type one of the characters because nothing will be displayed on the screen. Indeed, in order to type a punctuation character, the user has to type first the punctuation key then the space bar. The advantage of this type of keyboard is that, being normalized, it resides on most of computer systems, and the user just has to tell the operating system to use it. Nothing has to be installed.
While the US-International layout allows typing many accented characters, not all ASCII characters are necessarily available (for instance, the characters ª¯±·¸º), and many of them are available only in a convoluted manner. For instance, it is difficult to find a easy way to remember allowing to retrieve the Yen character (¥) or the ø. Another inconveniece of this layout is that even though it is claimed to be international, its limitation to the 8 bit ASCII character map and not UNICODE makes it unable to type correctly in certain languages like Romanian, or Turkish, which use letters like ş, ţ, ă, etc. The ASCII system also doesn't contain mathematic characters like ∀, ∃, ⇒ or Greek and Cyrillic characters.
[edit] Microsoft Windows : the ALT key
On the Microsoft Windows operating system, all characters can be reached via the ALT + <number> combination. Thus, we have:
etc.
See Alt_codes for more information.
This system is standard on Windows, but not Linux or other UNIX systems. It does however require memorising the character codes, use of Character Map, or having a table of the codes nearby. Moreover, a four-key combination can be time-consuming, especially when it is needed in order to access frequently used characters.
[edit] Microsoft Word
The Microsoft Word designers made it possible for the user to access accented characters in a more intuitive way. Indeed, all characters with accent are available using CTRL + <punctuation> then <letter>, for instance:
It would also be expected that:
But this is not implemented. Many people hope that Microsoft will resolve this deficency in future versions. Furthermore, it is unknown why Microsoft didn't integrate a keyboard layout with this behaviour - users can use this functionality in Word only, not even in other Microsoft Office programs.
