Fun Stuff > CHATTER

Shortcuts

<< < (4/6) > >>

Skewbrow:
Wish I had one of those for I have not figured out how to input Danish/Norwegian diphtongs with my laptop (the alt+numeric code is not a good option, because there is no separate numeric pad - I would need to hit NumLock first, and that screws up so many other keys). Our standard keyboard layout has umlauted letters where the US/UK keyboards (IIRC) have curly braces, square brackets and such. I need to press AltGr to get those, which makes using Mathematica a pain. Lose some - win some.

pwhodges:
I just keep the character map (in start/programs/accessories/system - why they hid it there beats me) open when I need to put in accents other than acute; or I Google a word that should have an accent and then copy from the first result that's correctly accented. If I have a document with a lot to do, I type without, then copy each required accented character and run through doing highlight/ctrl-V for each - tedious, but not actually that slow.  I never type the number, because it's more trouble to look it up than either of the ways I've suggested.

The ND scheme had a "supershift" key, and you'd type supershift+accent followed by the letter you wanted the accent on.  It accepted all the legal European combinations (that I knew of, anyway), and the keys chosen for the accents were quite mnemonic.  So "SS+o a" would give a-ring, "SS-: u" was u-umlaut, "SS+- d" that Icelandic crossed-d character, "SS+s c" c-cedilla.  More eastern diacritics like hook and macron were included.  You could even distinguish umlaut from double-acute accent properly (using SS+: or SS+").  So easy!

LTK:
Dutch keyboards layouts use dead keys. All your é-s and ü-s and ç-s and ñ-s within finger's reach, without changing function for quotation marks or apostrophes!

snalin:

--- Quote from: pwhodges on 11 Aug 2012, 14:54 ---
--- Quote from: Linds on 11 Aug 2012, 13:47 ---See it's all the multiple numbers I don't get. On a mac,
--- End quote ---

On the PC these vary according to the country of the keyboard.  For instance, a UK keyboard will give acute accents on all five vowels if pressed with the AltGr key, but US keyboards don't do that.  But no keyboard matches the ease with which Norsk Data's keyboards in the 1980s could type all European and Scandinavian accents :P

--- End quote ---

As far as I remember, they never jumped on the personal computer wagon, and died out as a result, right?

A big problem with having a Norwegian layout, is that the consoles for most games that include them (Morrowind is one example) does usually not recognize the different keyboard layouts. I've tried my way blindly throughout key combinations for finding ; a lot of times - always a hassle. Fresh OS installs can be a hassle too - I've been very confused by my keyboard doing weird things some times.

pwhodges:

--- Quote from: snalin on 13 Aug 2012, 13:47 ---
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 11 Aug 2012, 14:54 ---no keyboard matches the ease with which Norsk Data's keyboards in the 1980s could type all European and Scandinavian accents :P
--- End quote ---

As far as I remember, they never jumped on the personal computer wagon, and died out as a result, right?
--- End quote ---

It wasn't quite that simple, but that will do in summary.

Financially, their downfall was the takeover of the British computer company WordPlex, which happened while I was there; this led, in time, to mass resignations, eventually including mine.  I could write a whole essay on what was wrong with this takeover, but will restrain myself.

Technically, their 32-bit computers were unusual, because they used their 16-bit computers as a front-end and I/O processor for them.  When the PC appeared, they didn't accept it for what it was, but instead spent an inordinate amount of time trying to shoehorn their 32-bit processor onto an ISA board so that the PC could be used as the front-end and look like one of their own machines.  This project was called "Butterfly", and was as delicate and insubstantial as its name.  When it died, they had no other added value to offer the PC, and had missed lots of other boats.  They then, just before I left, hived off the 32-bit processors as a company called Dolphin Server Technologies (which sank without trace, I think), and lived on as a rump, largely in the UK and Pakistan (bizarrely!), providing computer services of various kinds; for instance, for a time they owned one of the UK's oldest bulletin-board systems - Cix.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page