Re: Decimal key on European keyboard layouts

Forwarded to the internationalization list [email protected]

On 13 Dec 2002, Christian Rose wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> When I press "," (the decimal symbol key) on the numerical part of my
> Swedish keyboard in XFree86, I get a "." (point). This is obviously
> wrong, as it should be a comma, the decimal symbol that is used in
> Sweden and what this key is labeled with on Swedish standard keyboards.
> 
> I've checked some other keyboard layouts and others for which the
> decimal key on the numeric keypad is a comma is as follows:
> Finland (identical to the Swedish layout), Denmark, Netherlands, Norway,
> Switzerland, Germany. I suspect that these may be wrongly defined as
> point too.
> 
> Anyone else seen this? Suggestions?

I'm not an expert on internationalization, but I think that in an 
ideal world, what it prints should be controlled by the LC_NUMERIC
locale setting.

Can you get any clue from the commands "locale" and "xev" whether
the key is sending the wrong value, or whether the wrong value is
being printed ?

Looking at the unicode charts (especially the character name index
	http://www.unicode.org/charts/charindex.html
) I see that ASCII dot 0x2E has become Unicode 0x002E "Decimal Point"
and ASCII comma 0x2C has become 0x002C "decimal separator".
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf
renders these in the English way, not the continental one you desire.

I suspect you are stuck with a standard which unifies the *meaning*
of the key at the expense of the visual representation; maybe you are
expect to use a different font on the continent ?

I hope that someone on the i18n list can give you a more positive answer.

-- 
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison		Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[email protected]	http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna