Switchable, Multilingual Keyboard

akorpija

05 Aug 2016, 05:06

Hi all,

My old man speaks a few different language, including English, Finnish, French, German, Spanish, and a few others. What he's after is a keyboard that can display different languages (doesn't have to be all of these languages) via, say, different LED lighting per key.

I've seen the Optimus Maximus, however, $1600 USD is well and truly above our budget haha


He's not great at touch-typing, so that's not an option ;)


Anybody have any ideas? Thanks!

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kbdfr
The Tiproman

05 Aug 2016, 08:09

Switching the whole keyboard to different national layouts would be a bad idea as many characters are placed otherwise (the French keyboard being the most obvious example). With an LED keyboard, you would be searching where the damned "é" now is, as it is typed differently on French, Spanish and Italian keyboards. With a conventional keyboard, you would be completely lost.

My advice: get a keyboard with additional programmable keys (with relegendable caps) and program each of these to one of the different characters needed in the different languages, leaving the "normal" alphabetic field as it is in your national layout.
As an example, adding the specific French, German, Spanish and Italian characters not present on the (e.g.) US keyboard would require 21 keys, ideally programmable on at least two layers to also produce the upper case characters.

Keyboards with those capabilites are for example the legendary Cherry G80-2100 and its successor G81-8308 (the latter alas with awful MY switches) or :mrgreen: the Tipro keyboards.

An even easier solution would be to stick to the usual keyboard and just add a programmable keypad with relegendable caps.

davkol

05 Aug 2016, 12:47

derp
Last edited by davkol on 18 Jan 2025, 23:17, edited 1 time in total.

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Laser
emacs -nw

05 Aug 2016, 14:11

@davkol - thanks for this info! I finally started to read about the compose key, and I'm now toying with WinCompose; I will probably add "ralt:compose" to XkbOptions when I will boot Linux :)

Findecanor

05 Aug 2016, 16:32

Another option would be to use the US-International layout with your regular ANSI keyboard. I think it should be available in Windows, as something that you chose in the keyboard settings in the control panel.

The symbols in Blue are available with the right Alt key. The layout of the symbols are often quite logical: for instance Alt-wovel adds a forward accent to the wovel.
The symbols in Red are "dead key symbols" that create a diacritic mark on the symbol of the next key you press.
For instance, to get À (upper-case A with a backward accent) you would press the ` key and then Shift-a.

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