Re: emulating keyboards with more keys

I regularly switch soft keyboard layouts and find it does not cause me any inconvenience。Maybe because I am used to it but also it is so easy to do。I regularly switch between US Extended & Chinese or US Extended & Japanese。I have my OSX system setup with the key combination ctrl+space to toggle between keyboard layout pairs。As I am typing this I am switching between US Extended & Chinese。

天天快乐

André

On 11 Jan 2013, at 08:40, Stephan Stiller wrote:

All,

Occasionally I run into the problem that I would like to use a keyboard layout for a 102/105-key keyboard (as used in Canada, the UK, Germany, and many other locales) or a 106/109-key keyboard (as used in (?)only Japan) on a 101/104-key keyboard (from the US but also used elsewhere).

(For 102/105-key keyboards, the extra key is the one between left-shift and (US) "Z", and one key is row-shifted. Describing the Japanese keyboard is a little trickier. I forgot whether the respective scancode sets are strict supersets of each other. And please feel free to correct me on the terminology or fill in what's missing.)

So, say I want to type French with the Canadian French keybaord layout (this is the one that lets you directly type the most letters among those used for the French language) or German with the standard German keyboard layout. Annoyingly I won't be able to enter "<" and ">" (in the German case) if I use a US keyboard, as it will have only 101/104 keys. Is there an easiest way (probably some software someone wrote) to emulate the missing keys?

Another example is that the JIS layout is basically unusable with a non-106/109 keyboard. This is not surprising, but it's limiting for international folks. (If I get a Japanese keyboard, things work under a non-Japanese Windows with some customization, but US Macs lacked a straightforward way of letting me use a Japanese keyboard on (US) Mac OS X, last time I tried. Different issue.)

To anybody with experience with this: What's the easiest way to circumvent this problem? Please note that I don't consider "switching keyboard layouts every time" or "defining my own keyboard layout" convenient possibilities (unless the latter is a customization for which there's software that lets me do this in a couple of minutes).

Stephan


Received on Fri Jan 11 2013 - 05:37:07 CST