The most direct way to work with foreign-language documents in Windows is to convert your system to that language. Fortunately, through the use of keyboard drivers you can change your computer from one language to another with a fair amount of ease.
I am fond of pointing out that computers are so dumb that they have to be told everything to do. This is especially true when it comes to keyboards. Your computer doesn't know what's printed on those keys. It has to be told what letter or function each single key represents. The program that does this is called a keyboard driver. The keyboard driver assigns character values to each key and it can assign any value it wants. A large set of keyboard drivers have been included with Windows that can implement keyboard layouts for several different nationalities.
If you bought your computer in the USA, it most likely arrived with the U.S. English keyboard driver installed, which causes the computer to interpret the keys according to the U.S. English keyboard layout. If you were to load the German keyboard driver, then the computer would interpret the keyboard according to the German keyboard layout, in which the "Y" and the "Z" change places, a number of special characters move to different keys, and certain keys serve a secondary function of placing the Umlaut over a vowel. If you were to load the French keyboard driver, then almost all the keys would be different. And if you want to stick with English, but you hate QWERTY, you could load the Dvorak keyboard driver. And so on.
Which immediately brings us to the main problem with and disadvantage of using a foreign keyboard driver: you need to know what the new layout is. Unfortunately, the last time I saw a foreign keyboard layout was in the MS-DOS 6.22 manual which shipped with Windows 3.1. And for some keyboards, such as the Russian or Greek, a keyboard layout was not provided, so the user must experiment with it and discover the layout on his own.
Another disadvantage to using a foreign keyboard is that some standard English characters are no longer available, such as the Spanish keyboard's lack of the "<" and the ">" (while the Spanish layout does show a key for these two characters, that key does not exist physically on the remapped US keyboard). To use those characters you must revert to the English keyboard. Fortunately for Windows 95/98 users, that system allows for very quick and easy switching between keyboards. Unfortunately for Windows 3.1 users, the procedure for switching is much more involved and painful.
In Windows 3.1 and DOS, the only way to select a different keyboard is to install it. This is hardly appropriate for on-the-fly keyboard switching.
However, in Windows 95/98 you can switch from one keyboard to another very quickly and at almost any time, even in the middle of a document. The following procedure assumes that the "Enable Indicator On Taskbar" and "Switch languages" options are selected on the Languages tab of the Keyboard Properties sheet:
To make matters worse, it is very difficult to get documentation on the layouts. The last time I saw a foreign keyboard layout was in the MS-DOS 6.22 manual which shipped with Windows 3.1. The best that I can recommend is to create your own layout map by trying every key. You will also have to test for some special behavior of some of these other keyboards that I will describe below.
Some of the special behavior of foreign keyboard drivers is:
For example, to type an "é" on the Spanish keyboard:
If pressing a dead key is followed by pressing a key whose character cannot take that accent, such as a "%", then the accent will appear alone, followed by the second character; e.g., "´%" and "^%".
Return to DWise1's Foreign and Special Characters in Word Processing Page
First uploaded on 2000 March 20.
E-Mail Address: dwise1@aol.com.