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Mad Poster
#26 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 12:44 AM
Back in the days when computers weren't for the likes of me, I used a German portable typewriter, and had to be careful about the transposed Y and Z. You couldn't just change keyboard drivers on a mechanical typewriter! Fortunately (in this case) I don't touch type, but it was still easy to make mistakes.

The reason why you use an American keyboard in Australia is probably because you use the dollar. I'm old enough to remember seeing adverts with prices in Australian pounds (£A) in magazines I read, but I think that's before your time Jo! The main difference between UK and American keyboards is that we have a pound sign as a shifted 3. Americans don't have much call for pound signs! Otherwise, because we both speak English, there's not much difference between UK and US keyboards. Language makes a bigger difference. The letter Z is common in German, whereas Y is comparatively rare. Hence the transposition of these two letters. The German keyboard also has to provide keys for the Umlaut characters, and the SZ character (ß). Their absence can be a problem for me when I have to type something in German with a UK keyboard. On word processors I sometimes use for this purpose, I try to use key reassignments or macros so tat I can type these characters using the F7 - F10 function keys. Otherwise I have to use the Microsoft Character Map. But it's a lot easier than it was using a UK typewriter! I've never used a French keyboard or typewriter, but I seem to recall it had more transposed letters than the German one. And it must be more complicated still with languages that don't use the Latin alphabet -- for example Simlish! Has anyone examined the keyboard of a Sim's computer?

How did we get this far off-topic?! But, like Jo, I find it interesting!

All Sims are beautiful -- even the ugly ones.
My Simblr ~~ My LJ
Sims' lives matter!
The Veronaville kids are alright.
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Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#27 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 12:55 AM
Andrew I do know that as I am a decimal currency baby. One of the trivia facts that stuck in my head as a kid was being told Australia changed over from pounds to dollars in February 1966 and I remembered that as was born in September of that year.

Don't you just love how a simple question changes into a totally different thread conversation. :D

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Née whiterider
retired moderator
#28 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 1:35 AM
You find US keyboards in a lot of Europe too - there's even a default keyboard layout in Windows called US International, which features goddamn pissing dead keys which I hate with a fiery passion (basically, whenever you type ' or " followed by a letter, it will automatically turn it into an accent or umlaut, such as é... to stop it doing that you have to put a space between the punctuation and the letter. If you actually *want* a space there, you have to type two spaces. This drove me absolutely freaking nuts when I was regularly using university computers to write papers with lots of quotations in them.) Although I live in the UK now, I bought my desktop keyboard when I was in the Netherlands, so it's a US one and I've made a custom layout for it without dead keys. Of course, Windows constantly switches my layout back to UK for no apparent reason, which I ask you to bear in mind if I ever post an email address with a " in the middle of it or a quote surrounded by @s.

Anyway, my point was that US keyboards are used in a lot of places .

What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#29 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 3:13 AM
Does that have anything to do with Word changing ' and " marks into gibberish on certain boards? (Not on MTS just a parenting board I frequent) It makes a gap at the top and bottom of the post and if I edit it for spelling at all the gibberish increases. So I end up going in and deleting gibberish and typing back in the ;, ' :. manually. It only happens if I copy and paste my post into Word to check for spelling.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Field Researcher
#30 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 9:52 AM
Twice in my time, I had accidentally hit some weird keys on my keyboard or gotten into a weird setting somewhere or... something, that caused all of my keyboard to be.... scrambled. Nothing was in its place! ? was where . was supposed to be and . was where < was supposed to be. It drove me absolutely insane and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why dis was happenin 2 meh.

Then I discovered that I had somehow changed the keyboard layout on the computer from Nordic to U.S. It took me a while to change it back, because I had to change several things in several places. I type without looking at the keyboard, because I know exactly where everything is.

And Nysha, what you say is called U.S. International on your computer sounds like Nordic on mine, and that is my default layout. If I want to make an ñ sign, I press and hold ALT GR and press a key next to my enter bar that has the ~ sign. However, if I want to write this: ~ n I would have to press and hold ALT GR, press the sign key, press space, press space again and then press n. I admit it's a bit extensive, but I couldn't imagine it being any other way! The Americans I speak to always write a normal n instead of ñ in Spanish words or fiancee instead of fiancé, claiming that they can't make those "letters". Maybe they just don't know how to make them on their U.S. keyboards? I don't know, but I do appreciate the versitility of my keyboard.

Also, on another side note... does anyone know what this sign means: § ??? Me and a friend looked it up yesterday and couldn't find anything about it anywhere. It's the one sign on my keyboard I can't make sense of. I must know what it means! It looks like the sign for simoleans, but what business would that have on my keyboard. I'm not that big of a nerd.
Needs Coffee
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#31 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 10:05 AM
I was going to say, that's the simolean sign and I've seen people use it and wished I either had it on my key board. Perhaps it's from some other currency?

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Mad Poster
#32 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 12:26 PM
Field Researcher
#33 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 12:52 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Annaminna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_sign


O joy and celebration, such a wonderful day, this is!

Much obliged!
Née whiterider
retired moderator
#34 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 1:14 PM
You can make those symbols on a US or UK keyboard layout, you just have to remember the alt codes. Which lots of people don't do.

And yes - dead keys make a lot of sense if you're typing in a language which needs accents! But I almost always type in English and only very very rarely in Dutch, and Dutch doesn't use accents much at all to begin with, so they've always been more trouble than they're worth to me.

That's a different thing to do with encoding, jo. Which browser do you use? All the major ones have spellecheck plugins you can install to check your spelling right in the new post box.

What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact.
Mad Poster
#35 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 8:33 PM
Do you all know the Microsoft Windows Character Map? It's been in Windows at least since Windows 3, and can be found (in Windows 7) under All Programs/Accessories/System Tools. It lets you graphically select almost any special character you want. You can then copy it to the clipboard and paste it into your document. (There's probably something vey similar on the Apple Mac.) For a long time I used the Character Map to paste the Simoleon sign into my posts (because I didn't know the alt code for § and couldn't be bothered to learn it!). Latterly I got fed up with that, so I pasted the Simoleon sign in to an empty Notepad text file, which I then saved as Simoleon.txt, a one byte long text file. Now I just open Simoleon.txt, copy the sign, and paste into my posts and Sim notes as required. ...Which is how I always use the Simoleon sign in my posts, rather than the Dollar sign -- because I'm pedantic about things like that! (I can hear my teen Sim Andrew saying to me, "Get a life!")

Before I got the Sims, I was familiar with the § sign through it's use in German legal codes and similar documents. Funnily enough I think a German reading aloud would pronounce §3 as "Paragraph Drei", which I always thought was odd because "Paragraph" clearly starts with a "P", not an "S". So I guessed that "§" must originally have been short for "Sektion" or something, rather than "Paragraph". That Wikipedia article in Annaminna's post seems to confirm that. Any native German speakers out there to give a definitive opinion?

Sorry for taking this poor thread even further off-topic!

All Sims are beautiful -- even the ugly ones.
My Simblr ~~ My LJ
Sims' lives matter!
The Veronaville kids are alright.
Needs Coffee
retired moderator
#36 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 9:18 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Nysha
That's a different thing to do with encoding, jo. Which browser do you use? All the major ones have spellecheck plugins you can install to check your spelling right in the new post box.


I use Firefox. It seems to depend on the forum if spell check is active or not, and it isn't active on the BabyCentre homeschooling board. I also can't seem to shake off the US spelling. If I am not awake I may accidentally do what it wants and make words like colour into color all because of my use of the U. How very rude of it! Happens right here. *glares at red wiggly lines under the words colour and centre*

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown
~Call me Jo~
Mad Poster
#37 Old 16th Nov 2014 at 11:55 PM
Quote:
Before I got the Sims, I was familiar with the § sign through it's use in German legal codes and similar documents. Funnily enough I think a German reading aloud would pronounce §3 as "Paragraph Drei", which I always thought was odd because "Paragraph" clearly starts with a "P", not an "S". So I guessed that "§" must originally have been short for "Sektion" or something, rather than "Paragraph". That Wikipedia article in Annaminna's post seems to confirm that. Any native German speakers out there to give a definitive opinion?


Well, I do not know German but found interesting fact. This sign is plural shortcut of German word "Satz"
Instructor
#38 Old 17th Nov 2014 at 7:39 AM
In Swedish "section" would translate to "paragraf". F ex Customs law so and so, section 36, would translate to "Tullagen, paragraf 36".
"Paragraph" translates into "Stycke". I think. (Could not install my English dictionary after installing Windows 7.)

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