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Most European keyboard layouts have it the other way around: first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to. Where some lay
by Findecanor 3y ago
Most European keyboard layouts have it the other way around: first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to.
Where some layouts may require this method for some characters, another keyboard layout may have the same character on a dedicated key.
The program receives the combined character as one unit, and does not need to be aware of different keyboard layouts.
- School-Cotton 3y ago> Most European keyboard layouts have it the other way around: first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to. Which ones? At least the French and German ones don’t work like that: there is no composing, just separate keys for all the characters with diacritics that appear in the language.
- greenshackle2 3y agoWhich French layout would that be? I've never seen a French keyboard where this is true. French is my native language. On layouts I'm familiar with, some accented letters have separate keys like é, but not all, the others are made by composing an accent key with a letter.
- School-Cotton 3y agoYou're right, sorry. I had forgotten about the ^ and ¨ keys.
- tpm 3y agoSlovak or Czech for example.
- gdprrrr 3y agoOn the German Layout the backtick (next to the 1 key) is a dead key.
- Akronymus 3y agoWhichbis the thing that finally pushed me over the edge and switch to the US layout. backticks are something I use all the time.
- riggsdk 3y agoDanish keyboards also require you to press '¨' first and then 'o' to produce 'ö'.
- mostlylurks 3y agoDo the danes not have the mechanism that is found on Finnish keyboard layouts, where pressing AltGr+Ö yields Ø and AltGr+Ä yields Æ, except in reverse?
- Findecanor 3y agoThose mappings are not universal. They are present under Linux but not on MS-Windows. I don't know about Mac, but the layout has in the past been slightly different there from Windows also.
- mostlylurks 3y agoInteresting, it's been like a decade since I last used windows, but I had to go and check what layouts are available, since I remember having these combinations on my layout. Apparently those combinations are provided by windows in the "Finnish and Sami" layout, which provides a number of extra letters (not just ones used by the Sami languages) through AltGr+letter combinations. I must have selected that as my layout at some point while I was still using windows, possibly for the purpose of getting easier access to letters like ÆØÕ, and just forgotten it after some time.
- kzrdude 3y agoThey are there on mac too, use option-Ä to get the Æ or the other way around. What's more, it has worked like that since system 7.x times or so, it's just a good idea.
- riggsdk 3y agoFor me that doesn't work on Windows. Those key combinations doesn't seem to do anything.
- TacticalCoder 3y agoNitpicking but most french keyboards have both ready-made keys for "é" and the few other commonly use keys and composing: hitting either '¨' or '^'. For example hitting '¨' then 'e' produces "ë".
- School-Cotton 3y agoYou are right, thanks.
- kergonath 3y agoThe AZERTY layout is nothing if not inconsistent.
- nicolaslem 3y agoFor this specific example, it is actually quite pragmatic. "é" being used many orders of magnitude more often than "ë" in French, it makes sense for it to have its own key.
- paledot 3y agoAlso, French has no other character that takes an acute accent. For the same reason, ç isn't typed with a dead key on French AZERTY.
- mostlylurks 3y agoThe nordic layout(s) offer such a mechanism to allow people to type in letters that you'll find in various other European languages, even though the extra letters used in the languages themselves (ÅÄÖÆØ) are present as their own keys. Interestingly, the Swedish layout has no dedicated é key, although é occurs in some Swedish words.
- gumby 3y agoIn Swedish, Å, Ä, and Ö are actual letters of the alphabet, while é is used in foreign words. Like the English dieresis (e.g. in coöperate) is essentially unknown in the US and only occasionally used in England, so doesn't give rise to characters with dieresis on the keyboard.
- kzrdude 3y agoé is used commonly in names and some words that don't feel foreign. For example the word for idea is written idé. Seems like it's an old loan from greek.
- karatinversion 3y agoThe accent gives away that this is in fact a loan from French
- kzrdude 3y agoI guess it's time to learn to use some real swedish words then and not the foreign ones. Bye idé, hello hugskott. (Hug/håg = mind, skott = shot)
- Reefersleep 3y agoDanish is one.
- hnbad 3y agoPress the key to the left of 1 (not the numpad) or the right of the Eszett (sharp S) on the German QWERTZ keyboard and you probably hit a dead key. There are dedicated keys for the German umlauts and Eszett but these are for French accents in loan words: â, á and à, e.g. as in Café. It's worth mentioning of course that there are no-dead-keys variants of the keyboard layout but this has been pretty much the norm on Windows since the 1990s I think.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago> first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to. That being exactly the way “floating diacritics” in ISO 2022 (or properly one of its Latin encodings, T.51 = ISO 6937) work, amusingly. I wonder which came first. (Yes, I know that a<BS>` came first, the ASCII spec even says that this should give you an accented character IIRC. Or perhaps it was one of the other “don’t call it ASCII” specs—ISO 646? IA5?..)