Special Green Characters (canadian kb)

There have been a few threads about the green buttons on the canadian keyboard. Some solutions have been posted, but they are for linux and not for windows xp.

I would love to use some of the buttons, but for the life of me I cant figure out the key combo needed to make them work.

I have used the windows xp language settings to add a few keyboard layouts, the canadian bilingual, and the canadian french, and canadian french (legacy) whatever that means. None of the kb layouts seem to change anything when I select them, I still can't get anything out of the buttons.

So what gives?? how do we use these characters?

thanks,

Vince

 

Nobody knows how to use these suckers?

 

The layout is IBM standard Canadian French -- As I do not use Windows XP, I can't help enable on this OS, but it is a standard keyboard layout (available on IBM keyboards). So, it should be straightforward; maybe Microsoft has a national version for this?

 

enabling the layout is no problem.

The language bar makes it easy to add the layout to the windows xp OS. I have done that.

I use Open-Office, it is easy to select the default language from the ones available on your OS. I have done that.

Still, there is no way to use the keys. They do the same thing no matter what software settings are chosen.

There has to be a hotkey combo of some kind. There is zero documentation about these keys provided by Acer.

 

Once enabled, the "extra" stuff printed on each key IS the symbol it produces -- eg. guilmots, not symbol, etc.

There is really no magic to using the layout. All the keys are labeled according to the layout. If you had a "real" French Canadian keyboard, you would see JUST the green labels.

The only way that this is multi-functional is that the OS should have some sort of easy tool to allow you to select layouts. But, the kick is that (even though I use the Fr-Can layout), I have never seen this layout used West of Ontario.

 

Ya that's how I figured it worked.

The only problem is that it doesn't work. I've tried in every word processor I can think of, no matter what the language setting is for the OS, the keys only do the regular function.

Oh well, whatever, its not that important.

 

I notice that the enter key and left-hand shift key suffer from shrinkage on my French-Canadian keyboard.

If I were to order a black US keyboard from that sourceIT spot that has parts ($30 or so), would it be plug and play, or will there be more to it than that?

The $30 would probably be worthwhile, as I keep hitting backslash accidentally instead of left shift and enter.

 

Just use keytweak to map them both to shift, works great.

 

If I did that, I wouldn't have any Backslash key, as in American-ese mode, both of those keys function as backslashes.

Anyone know if keyboards are interchangable? I can't see why not, but figure asking first is wise.

 

Yes they certainly are. go for it, its highly unlikely to be a different connector.