 Number 225 - February 2002 |
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| Typing in a Foreign Language | |||||
| by Les J. Kizer Greater Tampa Bay PCUG | |||||
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One of my SeniorNet
students was interested in typing in the German language. Most languages
have characters that are unique to the language, and German is no
exception.
Microsoft allows a person to easily switch Windows between language keyboards, but not the physical keyboards. When the switch is made, the physical layout of the keys on the keyboard changes to the national keyboard of that country. Even with such a switch, the unique foreign characters can be typed and then one can change back to the keyboard that agrees with the standard American typewriter keyboard. Note the difference in the German Standard keyboard and the English American keyboard. The number keys are identical. The alphabetic keys are identical except that Y and Z are swapped. The seven characters unique to the German language force alterations and a reduction in the number of special character; for example, the American brackets and braces are missing. I have no idea how Germans get the at-sign (@) used in email ids. German Standard Keyboard
English American Keyboard
Switching Keyboards For me, just being able to switch to the German keyboard for the seven unique German characters is sufficient and then I switch back to the American English keyboard. When more than one language keyboard has been defined, rotating through the defined keyboards is accomplished by holding down the Alt key and pressing the shift key (Alt+Shift). An icon in the lower right corner of the task bar shows the active language. If the language icon does not appear, you have only one defined language. Defining Another Language Keyboard Click: Start / Settings / Control Panel / Keyboard / Language / Add Click: German Standard or the language of your choice. Click: OK Click: Apply / OK Close everything and test the new capability with a word processor. Notice the language symbol that is now displayed in the lower right corner of the task bar. In this case it is "EN" for English and "DE" for German. You may add more languages. If you do, you should make a table similar to the German-English table above in order to locate the proper keys. |
Other Considerations
Font: The font must support the language. Support can be easily determined by selecting the language and then pressing all of the keys on the keyboard. If a character is not supported, a box character is displayed for that character; if printed, nothing is printed. By using this test, I discovered my Times New Roman font does not support Greek. Physically Changing a Keyboard: Except for the oriental languages, the same physical keyboard is used worldwide. The character images you see on your keyboard are actually caps snapped over the real keys. With just a bit of a tug from below the cap, the cap pops off the key. Thus, the character caps for each key can be moved about. Be careful to pry on the cap and not both the cap and the key itself. And, certainly, foreign language keyboards and key overlays can be purchased. Keyboard Definitions: If you think the English-American keyboard is it, there are eight English keyboards. There are five French keyboards, five German keyboards, two Italian and 20 Spanish keyboards. Accent Marks: Some foreign languages, such as French and Spanish, use accent marks and do not have single characters on their keyboards that combine the characters with the accent marks. On these keyboards, type the accent mark first followed by the character that is accented. The computer combines the accent mark and the character together as a single character. Speed Typing with Find-Replace: One technique that can be used to speed type foreign characters is to triple them when typing with the English keyboard. Then switch to the foreign language and use the Find-Replace function to replace the tripled characters with the single foreign character. For example in German, typing washing, we can type waaasche; and then using find replace to convert aaa to a single „ making w„sche. For some word processors, this technique could be done by a powerful find-replace macro that would switch from English to German, make the changes and then switch back to English. Presentation When presented to the class, one woman was pleased to know she could write in French and another had a daughter who wanted to use her PC to write in Russian. I wasn't surprised when we were able to type in French, but I was delighted to find that both Ariel and New Times Roman handled the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. TOGGLE Editor's Note: When entering the German characters with an umlaut and the other unique characters, in preparing this article for the printed version, we used the technique described above to select a German keyboard and inserted the correct symbols. Although the PageMaker manual had instructions on converting to some of the characters it did not include them all. The only way we could reproduce them properly was to convert to the German keyboard configuration--which, in fact, was much easier than using PageMaker's conversion table. Displaying the symbols correctly on the website is quite another matter. To see the code to be used in HTML for many foreign language or scientific characers go to http://hotwired.lycos.com/ webmonkey/ reference/ special_characters/ |
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Number 225 - February 2002
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