StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm using two applications (Gaim and Sylpheed) that use the GTK+ library or whatever it is on XP. They both work prefectly except neither of them allows me to type @ (the symbol "@") and that's one hell of a problem for an email client. I can copy and paste it into the dialog boxes just fine but the key combo (Ctrl-Alt-2/@) doesn't do anything.

Is there a way to fix this or am I just screwed ?

Odd, never experienced that... language settings maybe?

XP and all the apps are in English. I do have an AZERTY keyboard, but wouldn't those be supported ?

I can't find anyhting in the various FAQs.

well maybe it input like a french azerty
try "alt gr" + 0

Alt gr + 0 gives me }
Alt gr + 2 gives me @



Ah what the hell, at least it works. Thanks

Alt gr + 2 is the default for the @ symbol in many European keyboards that contain extra characters. The Finnish keyboard layout has the letters å, ä and ö that round out our 29 letter alphabet. That pushes a lot of special characters into the Shift + <number> range, and the remaining characters need to be placed someplace else. Which is where Alt gr comes in.

The Finnish keyboard produces the following from the uppermost line of the keyboard. First line is plain, second line is with Shift and third line with Alt gr (dots mean no combo): The Alt gr + 1 combo actually switches the active tab in Firefox to the first tab of the current window.

Edi

Huh. Learn something new every day - I never used that Alt Gr key before, it was just one of those keys that...sit...there...doing nothing. Like that lock key and the one that makes the context menu appear.

On all the southeast European layouts (basicly everyone but Turkey and Greece, maybe even them) the @ key combo is AltGr+V. I'd always wondered what prompted some of those layouts. For example, on my keyboard (as well as most of those mentioned above) the Z and Y keys are switched compared to US standard, Shift+2 produces " and all the other shift+number combos are shifter one place to the left with the ?/ and -_ keys switching places. There seems to be no real logic to those changes (some of the other characters are shifted to altgr combos to allow for ŠĐŽČĆ but these keys I can't figure out the reason for change).

It has always been a slight irritation for me. Especialy when programming when the US layout is usualy more efficient because of easier acssess to []|{} while when I need to write something official in Croatian I have to use the cro layout and thus suffer from Z/Y typos often.

Most of the keyboard layouts are based on the old typewriter layouts, which were in fact optimized for slowing down the typing speed, because otherwise the devices would have jammed. With the advent of computers, such is not a problem anymore, but the layout basics at least have too much inertia to change.

It's further complicated by the original ASCII character set only having been 128 bit, which doesn't cover all the special characters needed for various languages, so a 256 bit implementation has had all these symbols added. I suppose the seemingly random placements come from putting the unusual characters in places that are hard to hit by accident but not too difficult.

Some of it is too random, but the first place I'd look is the old typewriters.

I don't like the US layout, because to omany characters are on the otehr side of the keyboard from where I'm used to finding them, and I've gotten quite adept at getting them with the Alt gr combos. Also, I need the three vowels (well, two of them, really), but their placement with regard to typing Finnish sucks ass and sucks it hard.

Edi

Yeah, I agree with you there (and know the explanation you provided from before, I was hoping there was something more).

It is pretty obvious above close to what letters our "modified" graphems are in usage and prononciation (to write them out phoneticly, they would come out as SH, DJ, ZH, CH, CH, each spoken as one sound), yet they replace the ; ' [] \ keys on the US keyboard (ie are nowhere near their "parent" letter). Worse, since they were properly supported in various software only in the last couple of years many of the older internet users (like me) got into the habit of using "decapitated" letters online (c instead of č,ć, s instead of š, dj instead of đ, dz instead of dž etc.) which causes nice typos when writing something official.

Bleh, it all feels exactly like the kludgy patched up stuff that was done 2+ decades back to support nonstandard options, in this case other-then-english-laungages. ASCII being prime example of this. And while it is on the way out (replaced by, to me, slightly overengineered Unicode), the annoying keyboards remain. I would really like it if the smaller markets like ours (what, slightly more then 4 million potential users, and that if you consider todlers potential users) started to transition to a layout more in line either with the english layout or actual language needs, but not this kudge (or both - why can't, for instance, š be altgr-s instead of taking up a key - its not like it is used often).