From: Arcane Jill (arcanejill@ramonsky.com)
Date: Fri Dec 19 2003 - 03:05:33 EST
Yeh, £ is <shift 3> in Britain, right where # is in America (I think).
Another minor US/UK difference is that <shift 2> is double quotes in
England, not @. In England, EUR is definitely <alt-gr 4>. I guess
keyboard designers couldn't use <alt-gr e> because it was already in
use. On English keyboards, <alt-gr> + a, e, i, o and u give á, é, í, ó
and ú respectively. The other letter keys have no <alt-gr> assignments
at all, although obviously I can edit the keyboard layout to change that.
I never understood why a certain computer company saw fit to squeeze
three extra keys onto an already crowded keyboard. The left and right
<windows> keys are functionally identical anyway, and the <menu> key is
functionally identical to a right mouse click. In fact, if you have a
working mouse, you'll never use <windows> or <menu> anyway. Okay, I
accept that that particular OS needed TWO (not three) extra keys so that
people without a mouse could still use it, but /there were already three
unused keys on the keyboard./ Unused in Windows anyway. The keys <Prt
Sc>, <Scroll Lock> and <Pause> may have been needed for DOS, but have no
use at all in Windows. (Okay, so <Prt Sc> is used for "screen capture to
clipboard" but who needs a button for that?). They could have just used,
for example, <Scroll Lock> for <windows> and <Pause> for <menu>, without
then having to scrunch up the <alt> and <alt-gr> keys and shrink the
space bar. Maybe they just wanted to make more money by persuading
everyone they had to buy a new keyboard; maybe they wanted to spread
their logo around a bit further, who knows? But it was an extremely
silly idea from the end users' point of view.
As another aside (and a possibly useful tip), I once had a keyboard with
black keys, on which the letters were printed in white. Being a
touch-typist, I painted all the key legends out with black paint,
leaving only legendless keys. It wasn't the greatest of security
devices, but no-one else in my household would even /dream/ of using my
computer thus configured. Passwords? They wouldn't know where to start!
(Of course, they could have just unplugged the keyboard and plugged in a
different one, but it definitely stopped the casual curious).
Jill
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marco Cimarosti [mailto:marco.cimarosti@essetre.it]
> Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 5:44 PM
> To: 'Arcane Jill'; unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: RE: [OT] Keyboards (was: American English translation of
> characte r names)
>
>
> Arcane Jill wrote:
> > Yeah, everything's shifted around, I know. But I think we
> > have one extra key, all told, to make room for the GBP
> > currency symbol (£).
>
> Isn't shat <shift + 3> on the UK keyboard? That's where it is
> in Italy.
>
> All non-US keyboard have an extra key on the right hand of
> the left shift
> key; what that key is used for, depends on locale.
>
> > They didn't add an extra key for the Euro though. We access that as
> <alt-gr + 4>.
>
> What OS is it? Most european keyboard I have seen have euro
> on <AltGr + E>.
>
> > Guess my <left-shift> is smaller than yours.
>
> Americans' <left-shift> is bigger than anybody else's. :-)
>
> _ Marco
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Dec 19 2003 - 03:51:14 EST