Subject: Re: keyboard fixes

From: Olav Gundersen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 10:41:47 +0200

Hello, thank you very much for replying!
>
>can you give me a few key sequences that cover the cases that don't
>work?  one problem I have is trying to reproduce the key sequences
>using a US keyboard and one of the locale keyboard layouts (also, are
>you using the Nyorsk keyboard layout?  I just want to be sure that
>we're using the same thing).  
>

As this letter contains characters with a decimal value > 126 I do not know
if everything comes thru correctly.

(( I think you must have mistyped, because I do not know of a "nyorsk"
anything. We write two different dialects, nynorsk (meaning literally new
norwegian, but most properly translated as rural norwegian, and bokmål
("book-norwegian", closer to the Oslo-dialect), but certainly there is no
use for different keyboard-layouts and character sets, as the difference is
not bigger than between written british english and written US english.))

>From the control panel of Win95, under "Keyboard", I have chosen, under
"language" : "NO Norsk (bokmål)" , and under "general", I have chosen
"Standard 101/102 keys or Microsoft Natural Keyboard". I do not know if
these things are other than the  following excerpts from the Config.sys and
autoexec.bat files:

>From CONFIG.SYS:

device=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\display.sys con=(ega,,1)
Country=047,850,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\country.sys

This is the relevant part of AUTOEXEC.bat

mode con codepage prepare=((850) C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ega.cpi)
mode con codepage select=850
keyb no,,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\keyboard.sys

With this setup this is typed in "GNU Emacs 19.34.1 (i386-*-nt4.0) of Thu
Jan 30 1997 on woozle".

I type aigue and then a vowel:
´á
´é
´í
´ú
´ó
´ý

The expected outcome should have been only the accented character.
similar things happens with grave + vowel:
`à
`è
`ì
`ò
`ù

this is umlaut + vowel - it works OK:
ä
ë
ï
ö
ü
ÿ

Tilde does not work properly either
~ñ (used in spanish, I think only for n)

hat+ vowel works fine:
â
ê
î
û

>
>> The other annoying thing with version 19.34.1, is that the usual way of
>> accessing the entire set of 256 characters, namely to press the Alt key
>> while typing the characters' desimal number on the number keypad, does
not work.
>
>hmm, I don't remember hearing about this one.  can you give me an
>example, e.g., Alt-some keypad number produces the X character?
>
>is this feature an Emacs feature (i.e., Emacs on Unix works like
>this), or a Windows feature?
>
>-geoff
>

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------

This is typed in oemacs version 19.19 (for MS-dos, but run in a dos-window
under windows 95.

Here I can hold down the LEFT alt-key (NOT THE RIGHT which is only used for
keys with two different signs depicted on them), and then type the decimal
number for any character of the chosen character set. This is very handy
when using the new DC or EC fonts with all kinds of different european
characters for TeX. It is also  necessary for translating documents back and
forth between the new iso-latin char set under win95 and the old MS-DOS
char-set, and for writing e-lisp-scripts to do such translations.

So starting with 32 (space) I can type the entire character set up to 254
(255 is not accessible):

 (32)
! (33)
#
$ 
etc. etc.

¡ (161)
¢ (162)
etc.etc.
þ (254)

It was may experience that this feature was accessible from within most
ms-dos programs. I also works from within MS-WORD-7.0 under win95.

On my old Atari-st it was certainly not part of the operating system, but
built into some keyboard-layout adaptors. I had one program for installing
norwegian keyboard which did it and another which didn't. With MS-dos and
Windows I do not know on which level this feature belongs. As the example
above shows, it works OK in oemacs 19.19. 

Olav Gundersen
Philosophy dept.
University of Trondheim