From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Sep 19 2005 - 08:28:57 CDT
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
> Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
>
>> I should add that capital vowels with grave are only supported because
>> Microsoft has extended the French keyboard by overriding the behavior
>> of AltGr+7 as a grave accent dead key instead of the legacy ASCII only
>> character.
>
> Then they are supported.
You've not understood. Only the GRAVE accent is supported now as
supplementary a dead key (along with TILDE, except that French has no letter
with TILDE...), but not the CEDILLA (so can't type 'Ç'), and not the ACUTE
(so can't type 'É').
>> Also the AltGr key is a technical extension for PC, and not part of
>> the standard French keyboard which initially did not have it (it was
>> introduced by IBM just to allow inputing the missing ASCII character).
>
> ISO 9995-compliant keyboards are supposed to have a third shift state.
> PC keyboards implement this with AltGr, or equivalently Ctrl+Alt. Other
> platforms may implement it in different ways.
>
>> This means that OEM manufacturers can do something that will become a
>> recognized de facto standard, even in absence of a formal AFNOR
>> standard for France.
>
> This has always been true in the U.S. Perhaps AFNOR will recognize the
> value of Microsoft's de facto standard, and will revise the de jure
> standard accordingly.
OK, but not without the still missing ACUTE (at least for 'É') and CEDILLA
(at least for 'Ç'). Just approving the Microsoft de jure standard will not
be enough.
Personnaly, my extended keyboard maps the CEDILLA dead key as [AltGr]+[,]
(an easy menmonic), and the ACUTE ACCENT dead key as [AltGr]+[&1] (also easy
to remember; unfortunately I can't map it to [AltGr]+[é2] because it's
already mapped to the TILDE dead key on the standard French keyboard).
> As with the capital U with grave, or capital C with cedilla, you will
> always find someone who wants to set an ordinary word in all capitals
> for some reason, even if this is not standard French practice as you
> state. There is little reason for a keyboard layout to support one but
> not the other. If the layout provides a dedicated key for the lowercase
> letter but requires a dead-key combination for the uppercase, that is
> still better than not allowing the uppercase at all (cf. the Italian
> keyboard)
Replace "U with grave" above by "E with acute".
U with grave can already be composed with the GRAVE ACCENT dead key
[AltGr]+[è7] followed by normal capital U.
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