As you say, warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk.
This discussion underlines all the more strongly why I don't attempt to
produce final documents using vim: I sometimes use an actual word
processor like Open Office Writer, but mostly I write in HTML and, of
course, the best HTML editor on the planet is...
...vim!
Russ
P.S. Yes, typing é , œ and ü is painful, but I'm one
of those perfectionists who would have used half-spacing back in the old
days if I had been in need of such things. My father used a non-electric
typewriter, but I was 19 before I moved to France from the US and needed
what wasn't on the keyboard. After coming back at 25 (some 26+ years ago
now), I never lost the need to communicate and product documents of with
accents, digraphs, etc. in fact, I added the need to compose classical
Greek texts while in France, but that's a whole other mess.
A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
Warning: off-topic post. Read at your own risk.
Before computers, I used a "French" typewriter keyboard (AZERTY type).
Nowadays I use a "Belgian" computer keyboard (also AZERTY but with
special characters arranged differently). My father has an old
typewriter he bought in Switzerland when he was a student, and it uses
a QWERTZ layout. (Switzerland has four official languages, viz.
German, French, Italian and Romanche; and I don't know how many
different keyboards they use.)
On a mechanical typewriter, it was possible to use "half-spacing" by
holding the space bar down. So, if one wanted to produce the oe
digraph on a French typewriter (not an electric one though), it was
possible -- for a perfectionist. Let's say I wanted to type "boeuf" (=
beef/ox):
1. press and hold spacebar. This advances the carriage by one half space
2. hit b. This prints b without moving the carriage.
3. release, press and hold spacebar.
4. hit o
5. release spacebar. The carriage is now over the right half of the o.
6. hit e u f in succession.
The oe digraph is called "o, e dans l'o" and the ae digraph is called
in French "a, e dans l'a". The latter as in Serge Gainsbourg's song
"elaeudanla téitéia" (which spells the name "Laetitia").
French typewriters indeed seldom had the digits one and zero:
small-ell and big-oh were used insted. But it even carried over to
computers: Several decades ago (before the merger with Honeywell), the
(French) Bull computer company used on its computers a charset where
the same character could mean either zero or O-for-Oscar depending on
context -- and another one, I think, could mean one or I-for-India.
(Few computers had lowercase in those days.) This, of course, caused
headaches without end when trying to convert those computers' magnetic
tapes to IBM's BCD and EBCDIC standards or to (whose? PDP? CDC?
other?) ASCII.
I'm not sure non-English non-French non-German speaking countries all
use a US-derived keyboard, even if we limit ourselves to those that
use variants of the Latin alphabet. Typewriters, after all, date back
to (I think) before World War I, a time when English was much less
dominant internationally than it is now. At the courts of
St-Petersburg and Potsdam, French was spoken; Germany and Austria
together covered (or had recently covered) a territory that went from
Alsace to Silesia and from Schleswig-Holstein to the plain of the Po.
I suspect that most of Central Europe would have adopted a
German-derived (or maybe French-derived) keyboard regardless of
whether the majority language was Czech, Slovak, Italian, Hungarian,
Croatian...
I agree that the lack of oe OE digraphs in the Latin charsets is
probably due to their absence on French typewriter keyboards. (AE ae
were kept because they are used in Danish.) There is more than a
single-letter difference with English though: not only the layout is
different but there are several accented letters. The French (and
Belgian) keyboards have a dead key for circumflex and
trema/diaeresis/umlaut, but à ç é è ù and sometimes
uppercase-C-cedilla each have their own glyphs. (In French, uppercase
letters with the exception of C-cedilla and sometimes E-acute were
usually left unaccented. I believe computers are slowly pushing back
the trend.)
Best regards,
Tony.
