i would like to start a discussion about the german keyboard layout. contrary to english and french (and most of the other) layouts, there is currently no way to use standard german xkb layouts to type quotations typographically correctly.
three quotation schemes are used in german language: two side by side generally and one specially in switzerland. as for switzerland there is a separate layout, i will omit this case, although i know that even there approvements might be made. the remaining two quotation schemes used in german language (cf. duden) are » (opening qu. mark) « (closing qu. mark) and „ (opening qu. mark) “ (closing qu. mark). you might say, that « and » exist on the keyboard and “ does so too. but there is no way to enter those signs, necessary to type consistantly german texts: „ › ‹ (you have to either use angle marks or straight marks, you may not mix them). consequently, i propose to expand german layouts (except swiss). for not to brake too much, the simpliest changement would be to exchange standard latin quotation marks on <alt gr>+<v> and <alt gr>+<b> by corresponding german ones (3d level: „ and “ and 4th level: ‚ and ‘) of course, it would be nice to keep the ” signs somewhere, as not only me needs them when typing english, spanish, italian etc. texts, which, for typing, wouldn't need an extra layout. so, i would shift them to – until now unused – <alt gr>+<n>, consequently ’ to <alt gr>+<shift>+<n> the next questions would be how about endash and emdash, which i would like to have included, as for typographical reasons it would be a great help to have this globally included, but let us start with quotation marks. greets mcduff _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
