On Tue, 30 Jan 2018 08:18:49 +0100, Philippe Verdy wrote: > > I have always wondered why Microsoft did not push itself at least the five > simple additions needed since long in French for the French AZERTY LAYOUT:
Many people in Fɽanƈë are wondering, but it is primarily a matter of honoring a countryʼs policies and not interfering with official work. France is expected to fix itself its keyboarding problems and publish a standard, and thatʼs what is actually happening. See Shawn Steeleʼs blog post about Locale Data in Windows 10 & CLDR: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/shawnste/2015/08/29/locale-data-in-windows-10-cldr/ > - [AltGr]+[²] to produce the cedilla dead key (needed only before capital C > in French) : > this is frequently needed, the alternative would be [AltGr]+[C] to map "Ç" > without the dead key; That would be easier than Alt+0199. But Alt+something should yield consistently either uppercase or lowercase. Then, especially in the United States, not having all uppercase letters accessed with Shift+lowercase is considered counter-intuitive. And when the lowercase letter is directly accessed, going through a dead key to get its uppercase is not something I would recommend. Therefore, all uppercase that are used as initials (not Ù) should be Shift+lowercase, and digits in AltGr like on a few Latin layouts shipping with Windows, plus a Programmer toggle described in: https://unicode.org/cldr/trac/ticket/10851#comment:2 > spell checkers forget the frequent words: Ça or Ç'. I never use spell checkers, and when they show up with red wavy underline, I quickly try to disable them (outside of Gooogle Search). That is why I have typos. [This one has occurred unintentionally.] > > - [AltGr]+[1&] to produce the acute accent dead key (similar to [AltGr+7è`] > giving the grave accent deadkey) : > this is the most frequent missing letter we need all the time. Therefore, the É should be mapped to a live key. But the acute dead key is really the missing one. Belgiumʼs AZERTY has it. Getting É at least by dead key would have divided our trouble by half. > > - [AltGr]+[O] to produce "œ" (without ShiftLock or CapsLock mode enabled), > or "Œ" (in ShiftLock or CapsLock mode), and > [AltGr]+[Shift]+[O] to produce "Œ" (independantly of [ShiftLock] which is >disabled by [Shift], but without [CapsLock]) > or "œ" (independantly of [CapsLock], but without [ShiftLock]) : > this is needed occasionnaly for very few common words, the most frequent > omission is "Œuf" or its plural "Œufs". To repay the Œœ for its exclusion from Latin-1 (due to a Frenchman), it should be granted two key positions in the Base and Shift shift states, amidst the upper row letters. > > - [AltGr]+[A] to produce "æ" (without ShiftLock or CapsLock mode enabled), > or "Æ" (in ShiftLock or CapsLock mode), and > [AltGr]+[Shift]+[O] to produce "Æ" (independantly of [ShiftLock] which is >disabled by [Shift], but without [CapsLock]) > or "æ" (independantly of [CapsLock], but without [ShiftLock]) : > this is rarely needed, except for a few words borrowed from Latin used in > biology or some legal/judiciary terminology. And one spelling of _Lætitia_. > > - Adding Y to the list of allowed letters after the dieresis deadkey to > produce "Ÿ" : > the most frequent case is L'HAŸE-LÈS-ROSES, the official name of a French > municipality when written with full capitalisation, > almost all spell checkers often forget to correct capitalized names such as > this one. Thatʼs really something I never understood neither. Why that deadlist was not updated. Maybe like above: If Microsoft had updated our layout with 'Ÿ', we could have wondered why they didnʼt add the other missing stuff while they were on it. > > This would allow typing French completely including on initial capitals. > All other French capital letters can be typed (ÂÊÎÔÛ with the circumflex dead > key, > ËÏÜŸ with the dieresis dead key which already allows ÄÖ not needed for French > but for Alsatian or some names borrowed from German). > > But we have mappings already in the AZERTY layout for: > - the tilde as a dead key on [AltGr]+[2é~], even if it is not used for French >but only for "ñ" or "Ñ" in names from Spanish or Breton, That didnʼt prevent Breton authorities from refusing it in a first name, Denis Jacquerye reported in the wake of the Kazakh apostrophe thread: http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2018-m01/0133.html > " ÃÕ" not needed at all, /ãõ/ needed only for standard French IPA phonetics > where we still can't type /ɑɡʀɔɲ/ for French phonetics > - the grave accent as a dead key on [AltGr]+[7è`], needed for "ÀÈ" but >allowing also "ÌÒÙ" not used at all in French. > > There's not any good rationale in the French AZERTY layout to keep it > incomplete on capitals > while maintaining other capital letters with diacritics composed with dead > keys but not needed at all in French, > except the case of "ŸœŒ" missing from ISO 8859-1 but present in Windows-1252. There is even a way of putting all into the existing dead keys, if ‹ circumflex accent › (that is our directly accessed dead key) followed by any diacriticized letter did yield its uppercase, and followed by b or q, yield æ or œ… But that isnʼt what one would call a properly designed keyboard layout. > ---- > Using the Windows "Charmap" accessory with the "Unicode" charset and "Latin" > subset is still too difficult to locate the missing letters, > as it is only sorted by code point value but still does not cover all Latin > letters; > the Windows "Charmap" tool is usable for French only when selecting the > Windows-1252 charset (aka "Windows : Occidental"). > > But I don't understand why this accessory cannot simply add some rows at top > of the table for the current language selected > on the "Languages Bar", or why it does not simply features the complete > alphabet of the current language, sorted correctly > according to CLDR rules for that language (not sorted randomly by code point > value) to make it really usable. If we select > another subset, it should also be sortable according to language rules (or > CLDR default root otherwise) and not according to code point value: > this could be a simple checkbox or a pair of radio buttons (binary sort, or > alphabetic sort). > > Finally, the Charmap tool should be updated to add missing characters that > are not covered in the "Unicode" charset selection, > even if they are encoded in Unicode and really mapped in fonts: the coverage > of proposed "subsets" is an extremely old version of Unicode. I see that as a very valuable feature request. And this one doesnʼt need to wait for any national standard to get implemented. Regards, Marcel
