Which keyboard for 5 languages?

[pointertovoid]

Hello you all!

In a near future, I'll have to type a lot in 5+ languages with Latin letters, some heavily hyphenated (Spanish, Portuguese, -gasp- French, English, German) and I would enjoy so much using a single keyboard for all, since typing mistakes skyrocket when you change your keyboard layout, and since you type so much slower then...

Which keyboard layout do you suggest as the least bad for that? It can be exotic provided it's better and not worse than common ones. I don't mind changing my habits once.

An introduction here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

The characters I need are quite a bit, and dead keys to add hyphens look like the best compromise, but the layouts I've seen also need an Alt- or even Alt-Shift-something combination just to type some of the dead keys, which I feel quite impractical.

From the Wiki article, these layouts may cover nearly all needs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_US-International.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Latin_American.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Portuguese.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Portuguese.svg

For comparison, this is the stock of characters I have to use with copy-paste:

¿ ¡ «»

áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ

ã õ ñ ç Ã Õ Ñ Ç

âêîôû ß ÂÊÎÔÛ

äëïöü æ œ ÄËÏÖÜ Æ Œ

àèìòù ÀÈÌÒÙ

where some quote characters are still missing. And yes, I do need hyphenated capital letters, of course.

Suggestions?

[Ponch]

I'd use your plain french keyboard which already has a set of accents. You might also be interresed into "Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator".

For some characters that I see you now cut and paste, you might also try to memorize this B) and use "Alt+the code".

Like Alt+168 gives "¿".

Edited June 26, 2009 by Ponch

[pointertovoid]

Thanks Ponch!

Well, the French azerty keyboard has some characters for French (but not even the hyphenated capital letters, what a shame) and gets impractical for Spanish and Portuguese, as its hyphens aren't dead keys and thus offer no means to produce the áíóúÁÍÓÚ for instance. Each sentence containing ten of them, it gets boring. For that same reason, typing the Ascii code isn't a wonderful solution as I'd need to do it too often; faster than copy-paste for sure but still long.

I enjoyed dead keys for hyphens when using the German qwertz keyboard. It takes two hits to produce an é instead of one on the French azerty, but then the qwertz easily produces the É for French and the áíóú for Spanish and Portuguese. The German qwertz is no global solution as it lacks a ç for instance, but its dead keys that hyphenate all letters are definitely the right direction as I can't add 50 keys to the keyboard.

Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator: yes. I'll definitely consider it (or one of its competitors) if I don't find a nice existing keyboard.

Some layouts were made available by their authors, for instance

http://home.pro.tiscali.be/~fbou2235/kbdfr...#Telechargement

which is very good for French but doesn't improve Portuguese.

[Edit: 404 meanwhile. Author was Denis Liégeois, he called his layout Français Enrichi]

I'm a bit wary against loading a special layout. My intuition tells me that some applications won't use it (just like Firefox doesn't use my scrolling mouse driver for instance), there will be incompatibilities, or it will not run identically on several computers, or in F8 mode or in the console... You know, just the usual paranoia of any computer user. But this may well become the answer for lack of a better one.

Edited June 26, 2009 by pointertovoid

[puntoMX]

I would consider a Spanish layout. Personally I like it better than the Latin version. The only thing you would be missing is the German "ß" and the "æ œ".

By the way, buy MS Office 2007 and the spell check will help you out too. If you are chatting you have a problem indeed .