From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Fri Sep 23 2005 - 07:25:58 CDT
On Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 18:19Z Philippe Verdy wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Sep 2005, Antoine Leca wrote:
>> A widely different yet possible explanation is that on the 437
>> codepage (as on any PC screen on boot), the only French
>> "extended" capitals were Æ, Ü and É; the Æ digraph and Ü
>> are very uncommon, so it may explain also the rule.
>
> You forget other extended capital letters needed for French:
No. But you forgot to read what I wrote.
I acknowledge I forgot Ç. I apologize for that, I should have known better.
It does not change the point, since it is also uncommon.
> - 'Â', 'Ê', 'Î', 'Ô', 'Û' : all of them can be composed with the
> standard French keyboard,
Just try under codepage 437 (a standard PC, using plain basic DOS; _without_
DISPLAY.SYS and the bloated magic inserted by the latter versions of MS-DOS,
just the KEYBFR or KEYB FR driver.)
Then you can come back to comment about it.
> - 'Ä', 'Ë', 'Ï', 'Ö', 'Ÿ', in addition to 'Ü' already listed by you,
I am not aware that Ä or Ö are used in "official" French (considering your
words about Ñ). And about Ÿ, well your mileage may vary a lot here, there
are a lot of keyboard layouts which do not allow you to type it.
> (note that Ÿ is extremely rare, occuring only on rare French proper
> names when written in all-capitals style;
Of course, Ü or Ù are much more common.
> - 'Ç' : can't be composed with any widely available driver,
Give a try to Option and the ç key. ;-)
> but 'ç' can be composed with a simple single keystroke
And the point is?
> - 'æ' and 'Æ' digraph ligatures are part of French, but used only for
> pedantic/scientific Latin words. They are not supported by standard
> drivers,
Just press Option A (with the shift key if you want the uppercase). It is
even logical!
> - 'œ' and 'Œ' digraph ligatures are part of the normal and common
> French orthography, but not composable in any widely available
> driver.
Again, the most obvious way works: Option and O, along with the shift key if
you want uppercase.
> Conclusion: ISO-8859-15 and Windows 1252 both have all the necessary
> characters for French.
Which have absolutely nothing to do with my original point you quoted.
Congratulations and many thanks for the lesson^H^H^H^H^H^Hdissertation.
> There's no reason to not map the only two missing (and very frequent)
> French capital letters 'É', 'Ç' on the French keyboard. Optionally a
> French keyboard should support 'œ'/'Œ', and could (possibly) support
> 'æ'/'Æ' but there's much less need.
I agree about Æ, but saying there is use for Ç and less need for œ is...
funny to say the least. LOL.
Antoine
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