From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Tue Sep 20 2005 - 04:16:40 CDT
On Monday, September 19, 2005 16:05Z Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Doug Ewell wrote:
>
>> Sorry, you are right. Looking at the French layout again, I see that
>> the capital letters with cedilla and acute are not supported by
>> either dedicated keys or dead-key combinations, i.e. not supported
>> at all.
>
> Sounds very odd.
But true. Neither is on the typical keyboard the Πligature (or digraph),
used in word as common as beef, eye, or heart.
> I've sometimes heard that an acute is used with E even
> when diacritic marks are not otherwise used with capital
> letters in French.
Strange.
Of the accentuated letters taken as Titlecase (capital first in a word, that
is, unless you write in fullcaps), Ù does not occur in French; similarly, È
is uncommon to say the least. Ç only occurs as initials in "degenerate"
forms of Cela (ça) and in also in an important concept of psychanalysis, Çà
(always capitalized; I guess it is written This in English). À occurs often
as isolate word (meaning roughly to), but there are a known stream of
laziness among typists to drop (irregularly) this accent. So yes, the only
that remains and occurs not infrequently is É; which is by far the most
frequent in lead. This might explain the 'rule' you heard. Neverless, it is
not correct according to the rules.
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.
> Now it seems that this is a particularly difficult character on French
keyboards.
Yes.
> Does this mean that the French use e.g. Alt-0201 when
> they wish to type E with acute accent (É)?
You have various options, and I guess Alt+0201 is one of the least used.
The 'real' typists in France (DTP world) are using Macintoshs, and they get
É (and the various others) using the CapsLock key.
Old PC users got used with Alt+144 (which should give you the same thing as
Alt+0201, but predates it).
Microsoft Word users OTOH could have read the online help, and might have
spotted the paragraph that indicates they can type Ctrl+apostrophe (?) then
E to get É.
Finally, some people (like Philippe Verdy) have developped extended keyboard
layouts that have easier ways to input those characters; I find common among
those extensions to allow AltGr+1 to behaves as acute accent dead key, so
<AltGr+1, E> gives you É.
Ah, and I forgot: Canadians just press Shift, then É. While I just press ´
(between Ñ and Ç), then Shift, then E. In other words, you can _also_ use
another keyboard, with another layout.
Antoine
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