AZERTY

Told you it utterly sucks as a keyboard layout.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-eu-35365604

And they didn’t even touch on the convoluted way to get at the @ character.

Very interesting indeed! Not least because it gives a “hook” for remembering which is which of “ou” (or) and “où” (where).

That the “ù” character is used only in one word as stated demands the question “Where?” (well, perhaps “which” if you’re being picky, but it’ll do for me!).

Right, so Azerty would appear to be the least useful layout for French use.

In economic terms would it not make sense to use the common UK QWERTY and program keys to produce accented characters with the use of Fn+ immediately after the unaccented character?
Fn could just as easily be some other non-character key

It would be case of using QWERTY, a standard run keyboard, and a “French module”, it even has a nice currency symbol on shift+3 which visually similar to the Euro symbol.
Fn+< and Fn+> (bottom right of keyboard) could give the << and >>

Of course, it being obvious and convenient as well as cheap will count for nothing as the French authorities wouldn’t want to be using anything similar to a UK item. :)
More appealing in French terms would be to create a new key placement that is non-QWERTY and use that module and a special “accent key that isn’t Fn”.
This latter version being the wife in secretarial typist mode.

What will probably happen is a ttal abortion that isn’t AZERTY or QWERTY and still has nasty accented character keys occupying space for no good reason.

Right, so Azerty would appear to be the least useful layout for French use.

There. Fixed that for you.

What will probably happen is a ttal abortion that isn’t AZERTY or QWERTY and still has nasty accented character keys occupying space for no good reason.

The game is called “hunt the punctuation”… Notice they’re steadfastly REFUSING to give up the uniquely French attribute of Shifting to get at the numbers. And… And… The Alt[Gr] key was made for abuse like this, right?

They explain all that crap as follows:

http://bepo.fr/wiki/Accueil

Right, so Azerty would appear to be the least useful layout for French use.

The same for QWERTY. They are made to be not efficient.
See where is the W in English keyboard. Or euioy.

and still has nasty accented character keys occupying space for no good reason.

Accents are unfortunately essential to understand some words in French.
ou <> où
à <> a
tache <> tâche
plante <> planté
etc.

There are hundred of examples.
Accents are not here for the coolness of the language. You have 26 characters, we have a few more.
e and é are absolutely not the same, as ß and s are all but the same in German.

Accents are not here for the coolness of the language. You have 26 characters, we have a few more.
e and é are absolutely not the same, as ß and s are all but the same in German.

QWERTY was just for cheapness, you could just as easily do a custom layout with the characters of the 26 standard in a convenient order and the use of Alt-Gr (or relabel it as “Acnt”) and use in the fashion suggested earlier.
QWERTY requires no mechanical changes, just software, and character keycap rearrangement is obviously a tooling change, but again lowish cost with the accent work done in software.

It’s logical, like the Germans phasing out ß, which I believe they started into a number of years back.

In the days when writing keyboard drivers for RISC OS was easy, I wrote drivers that let me type in Hindi, Russian or Greek using the standard keyboard layouts for those languages, and one that let me type any Latin alphabet language (except Vietnamese) without changing keyboard driver – using the old typewriter “dead key” accent system, where the accent is treated as a separate character that you type before the letter, and which doesn’t advance the carriage. I made fonts with zero width accents to suit, and a little application that kerned them nicely into position so you could use dead key accents with a non-monospace font. (This was important to me because we were publishing hundreds of academic papers with names and addresses of authors from all over the world.)

Acorn User published my article on it, complete with the software. With the new huge fonts, we could have an application that replaced the dead-key accent/letter combination with the accented character now.

It seems not to be so easy to write keyboard drivers any more, sadly.

using the old typewriter “dead key” accent system

Both Windows and OS X use that system to this day for typing Maori; typing ` followed by e results in ē, and so on for the other “macronised vowels”.

It’s actually a relatively new concept in Windows; about 15 years ago Word had a special toolbar where you could click on ā, ē, ī, ō and ū icons to “type” them. That’s gone now that there is a native keyboard layout for it.

On the strength of my Acorn User article, I got offered a contract by a Microsoft Fellow to write a Windoze keyboard driver for the craziest keyboard you’ve ever seen – photo at https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153284003427762 – I couldn’t take the contract as it would have conflicted with my employment contract. But my then 14-year-old son offered to do it, got the contract, and did it. I don’t think the barmy thing ever saw the light of day though.
Blimey. About sixteen years ago.

A surprising new topic of conversation for my next visit to France in two days’ time.

Having been a QWERTY touch-typist for almost sixty years, I know how I’d react to being asked to retrain on a comprehensively redesigned keyboard, e.g. le Bépo that Rick showed above. Even a rethought AZERTY will likely be hard to swallow given the number of ‘improvements’ demanded.

I’m just grateful that RISC OS makes at least the French diacritics, ligatures and guillemets all so easy.

And the German too, of course. By the way, Wikipedia doesn’t suggest they are abandoning the Eszett or scharfes S, as ß is known there.

By the way, Wikipedia doesn’t suggest they are abandoning the Eszett or scharfes S, as ß is known there.

From the first paragraph of the sub-page for Eszett:
“Since the German orthography reform of 1996, it is used only after long vowels and diphthongs while ss is written after short vowels.”

Of AZERTY: As ever the French are approaching it wrong. The failings of the layout lie in allocating specific keys for accents rather than using the dead key system.
Niggles concerning the specific character layout are similar to those concerning QWERTY and changing that aspect would disrupt much with little gain. As the article Rick referenced says “But writing habits are by now too deeply ingrained.”

Wholesale change is likely to lead to rejection. Hence my suggestion of a standard QWERTY plus a soft change for the dead key system. It’s low cost.
It would be rejected in favour of retaining AZERTY with a soft change. That’s lower cost.

The failings of the layout lie in allocating specific keys for accents rather than using the dead key system.

And there are two very good reasons for this:
1/ accents are not an option.
2/ é à and some other characters are MUCH MORE common than many letters (KWXYZ, etc.). é and è are almost as common as e. It’s not because you don’t use them that we don’t use them. Else I could say that since Americans never use the £ character, we should remove it from the ‘standard’ QWERTY keyboard :)

Not to be able to get accents directly would be a fantastic waste of time for users.
Anyway, your idea of a standard QWERTY system can’t work. First because QWERTY is all but a standard :)

Best, is to put in the middle the most common letters, based on vocabulary. For example, Q is much more common in French than in English, so it’ll not be at the same place.
Oups, that’s what DVORAK and BEPO try to do :)

accents are not an option.

It’s interesting to note that you think that I was saying they were.
Using a standardised character keycap set and layout¹ and a soft change system is the ideal solution. None of the drawbacks of trying to allocate keys to accented versions of a normal character and losing easy access to another common key (or do the French not count using the decimal characters? I suspect we all know they do)

Back in the day typesetters and such had dead keys for this, the modern version would be a software module as soft solutions come cheaper.

Else I could say that since Americans never use the £ character, we should remove it from the ‘standard’ QWERTY keyboard :)

Ah, now can I remove the additional strange E thing from my “4” key too? :)

¹ Pick a layout people already use then you don’t need to retrain the brains of the large portion of the population who care little beyond being able to what they could before but easier on certain aspects.

Reality check: only the QWERTY keyboards in Britain and Ireland have a £ key. If the UK layout really were ‘standard’, I would probably have had better luck replacing the aging RiscPC keyboard which I still use with my current computer. Not because of the £ key, of course. I just can’t get used to the layout of the real standard (US) keyboards…

David:

1/ accents are not an option.

Nobody said they were. However the use of a “dead key” system permits accented characters to be accessible without needing to devote entire keys to them alone, meaning you can have more from the keyboard. You should already know – doesn’t the ^ " key near Enter work as a dead key?

It’s not because you don’t use them that we don’t use them.

;-)

The question is that there are only so many keys available. How to permit the most things to be available without complications? Sure, French keyboards can do é easily – but it’s a pain finding ‘@’.

For what it is worth, on the British International layout (Windows, not RISC OS), getting é is as easy as AltGr-e. Works with Shift too for É, and of course íóú etc. The backwards accent? Press AltGr-` followed by the letter. AltGr-c for ç. AltGr-^ then e for ê. AltGr-" then u for ü.
As I type French on a British International layout keyboard, I bet you I can type just as quickly and competently as anybody French with the same degree of typing skills as me. Obviously it would be easier to have a specific dead key for ` and ’ as grave and acute accents are very common in French – but to be honest, the hindrance is not that big a deal, and using QWERTY with some dead keys would be a lot less WTF!? for everybody than something like BEPO.

Okay, the AltGr method is hardly intuitive; but that’s because the British layout does not have any dead keys. It’s a compromise to be able to provide easy access to accented letters while the typical use case (English!) only tends to put accents over foreign loan names such as Amélie, Chloë, or Zoë (though I note with some amusement that English people write Chloë despite no historical origin of that name having diaeresis; and as for Zoé Zoey Zoi pick your preferred spelling…).

Not to be able to get accents directly would be a fantastic waste of time for users.

I’m not sure I can agree with that.
Í’m ñôt süré Í çáñ ágréé wíth thát. Only slightly slower as I forget where ñ was (AltGr-~ then n). ;-)

Best, is to put in the middle the most common letters, […] Oups, that’s what DVORAK and BEPO try to do :)

BEPO puts punctuation in the middle (!). Q is… lower right. Sort of.

Frank:

I just can’t get used to the layout of the real standard (US) keyboards…

You mean the " ’ nonsense? ;-)

One of the things that really bugs me with iOS is that when in British keyboard layout, it still expects both quotes to be on a line together, and @ over the 2. Typical bloody-minded American exceptionalism. :-/

Could be worse…

http://www.pcworld.com/article/139100/the_10_worst_pc_keyboards_of_all_time.html

I’d throw in the Oric as well for a crappy keyboard.

Typical bloody-minded American exceptionalism. :-/

Apple, Jobs, explains everything.

Microsoft is “guilty” of keyboard assumptions too. As some of you will be aware, I live in NZ. We use proper English, but US keyboards (probably a cost-saving exercise, since we don’t need to use the £ sign very often).

When Windows 8 came along, Microsoft localised it into proper English, but also apparently assumed that everyone using the localised version would also be using a UK keyboard. While you can change the keyboard layout during installation, it’s a serious problem when troubleshooting: Boot from the Windows DVD, open the Command Prompt, try to do a “cd \windows” or similar and then get flummoxed when the “\” key types “#”.

The Windows DVD does have an option to change the keyboard layout, but it doesn’t affect the Command Prompt. I ended up having to copy and paste the “\” from some existing text!

Nobody said they were. However the use of a “dead key” system permits accented characters to be accessible…

Of course. That’s why we have accents / dead keys and some other characters as é è à ç directly available. Depending of the use of each accented character.

For what it is worth, on the British International layout (Windows, not RISC OS), getting é is as easy as AltGr-e.

é, è are more common than many characters in French. So two presses is really not a good choice for productivity.

but to be honest, the hindrance is not that big a deal

A part of my job is to help people using a computer. When I see the difficulties they have to get @, forget dead keys :)

BEPO puts punctuation in the middle (!)

Yep, Q is at the same distance from middle than è. Quite logical.

If thinking of a different key layout that has to be relearned and will be even less usable for visiting non-French.
Why not go for something completely different like a phonetic based keyboard like this: http://www.velotype.com/en/
It will be the fastest.

I’m looking at this page and am wondering what sort of mess it might make of code…

Given the high number of wrist rest users in our organisation as indication of normal hand placement and the positioning of active keys under the wrist/heel of hand I’d say the keyboard is largely useless for office workers.

That ignores the fact that you’d be likely to get a near 100% rejection on the grounds of unfamiliarity which means that the key position issue becomes secondary.

Should a common keyboard layout be designed for the whole community (familiar with the ISO8859- character sets), then I would accept loosing keys dedicated to accented glyphs on my keyboard, in exchange for a convenient way to add accents to lowercase letters as well as to uppercase letters.
What I am asking for in return would be that no more than two consecutive keystrokes be necessary for doing this whatever the character (be it the spanish “ñ”, the french “ç” or the german “ß” no withstanding the numerous glyphs of polish language). That would imply that the accents themselves appear on such designed keyboard, along with monetary glyphs (€ or £). Can a keyboard with three glyphs on display be readable and easy to type in?
I would suggest that, if such task would be too difficult for us mere mortal that, a “new starting point” could look like the photo @ http://www.datamath.org/Speech/SpeaknSpell_86.htm ;-).

What I am asking for in return would be that no more than two consecutive keystrokes be necessary for doing this whatever the character

That’s exactly what altGr + a “standard 26 character glyph” achieves on a windows PeeCee for instance I hold down “AltGr” and tap “e” and get é or “AltGr” and “a” for á

That would imply that the accents themselves appear on such designed keyboard, along with monetary glyphs (€ or £).

Not necessarily, see above. Monetary glyphs – probably sensible to assume each goes with a country code so if you’re in France the the Euro is where the pound would be on a UK machine (alternate currencies could be elsewhere and less accessible)

Can a keyboard with three glyphs on display be readable and easy to type in?

Typical UK qwerty laptop has things like / ? + all on the same key. That’s key only, key plus shift and key plus Fn respectively. However A-Z are all upper and lower case so that complicates things.

I would suggest that, if such task would be too difficult for us mere mortal that, a “new starting point” could look like the photo @ http://www.datamath.org/Speech/SpeaknSpell_86.htm ;-)

I tend to agree that if you were really proposing to throw out the AZERTY layout and not use another existing layout then you might as well go straight alphabet.

The thing is that for the French, used to AZERTY, keeping the core alphabet 26 characters and using AltGr as the means of applying accents frees up all the keys in the numeric row to be numbers and various others to be punctuation (as in the English speaking world) and it can be done in software. New keycaps for the freed up keys or sticky labels?
I do tease about using QWERTY but it’s only playful. QWERTY is no better or worse than AZERTY if you ignore the insane use of distinct keys for accented versions of an existing key.

Benoit:

I would accept loosing keys dedicated to accented glyphs on my keyboard, in exchange for a convenient way to add accents to lowercase letters as well as to uppercase letters.

? Doesn’t it work if you press the letter key with Shift held down? AltGr+E gives me é and AltGr-Shift-E gives me É (Win XP, British International keyboard).
Similar idea for RISC OS, only I think it is AltGr+[ and then press E (or Shift-E).

What I am asking for in return would be that no more than two consecutive keystrokes be necessary for doing this whatever the character

Already done. Both UK and US offer international keyboard options. As expected, they’re different. ;-)

Can a keyboard with three glyphs on display be readable and easy to type in?

That’s what colours are for.

I had to make some compromises as the kana is printed on the lower right, but there’s a good few things on some of the keys, especially the Z key as with FN it becomes the \ key. ;-)

In short, it’s possible.

Oh, and see the diagram above for an example of four things on many of the keys.

Steve:

Monetary glyphs – probably sensible to assume each goes with a country code so if you’re in France the the Euro is where the pound would be on a UK machine

Even more sensible to have all of the expected currency symbols on various Shift-key or Alt-key patterns, and a configurable option to select which one (other than $) is available above the 3 key. For instance, € is probably not so useful to you, just as £ is not so useful to me. That said, Shift-3 for £ and AltGr-4 for € wasn’t exactly hard, and they’re both marked on the keyboard…
On a French keyboard, € is on the E key, as there is a dedicated key for é because AltGr-E is too hard. ;-)

frees up all the keys in the numeric row to be numbers

I don’t think the French are psychologically prepared for that. Even the fancy revised BEPO keyboard requires Shifting to get to the numbers. Heh, the people that make the standards probably think that numbers are for the encadrement, not peons like me.

New keycaps for the freed up keys or sticky labels?

Essentially all a keyboard does is send codes for keys pressed. Everything else is software interpretation. How did I turn my Bluetooth AZERTY keyboard into British layout? Easy. I stuck new labels on the keys and then told my iPad it was a British layout. http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20140902
This method will work with pretty much any language that doesn’t require additional keys (like “変換”).

if you ignore the insane use of distinct keys for accented versions of an existing key.

…and an entire key dedicated to a superscript ‘2’ (does anybody ever use this?), along with obfuscating the ‘@’ key. Hence, the AZERTY layout is worse than QWERTY.

Two good things about AZERTY: 1, You can type happy smilies really easily. ;-) just flows and doesn’t need shifting or anything. And pound/dollar/eggsplat symbols are all on one key together, which sort of makes sense. It’s a shame they didn’t AltGr-Shift and fit the euro in there too.