Sunday, August 03, 2008

DANISH KEYBOARDS

Have I ever ranted about keyboards, French keyboards in particular? Every year on holidays I would try to use the awful AZERTY things and write utter gobbledygook. But even standard British ones annoy me because if you write a lot in a foreign language (which I do) you either have to remember where the accented characters are hidden - combinations of Alt Gr and Alt and the likes or customize them and try to remember the other combinations any time you are on someone else's machine. Pain in the arse...
So what a breath of fresh air to discover the standard Danish keyboard. Firstly it is QWERTY, which is nice. Secondly the actual Danish accented characters have their own separate keys: look ÆØÅ! But the also have dead accent keys. If you want é, you simply type a dead accent and the computer remembers it so sticks it on the next letter you type. So you can make anything valid up: éèÖã etc
Easy peasy lemon queasy - wish I could afford a Danish laptop but I guess it comes with too high a tax bill :-(

3 comments:

Trine said...

You just have to set the computer for Danish layout and don't look at it, just type.

My keyboard is Danish, but the computer is set for British layout. It works out just fine.

Phyl said...

You are assuming touch typing skills way beyond my capabilities ;-)

Sebastian said...

Du kan jo også bare købe et dansk tastatur og skifte det andet ud, eller evt bare slutte det til via usb-porten, eller sætte små mærkater på tasterne med de danske bogstaver og tegn.