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The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

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Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#81
post #18
post #2

There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no. One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing t…

As multilingual user constantly switching between 3 languages, that's why I fully committed to the US_intl keyboard layout a while ago and ditched the abomination that is QWERTZ. Took a while to get used to, but overall it has been a very noticeable improvement. One layout to cover all languages, no more constant switching. Edit for clarity: I type "a to get ä and 'a to get à. If I want to type actual quotes followed…

It is fine as long as you don't have to user other people computers.

I used a QWERTY keyboard in France for a while, but switching back and forth between AZERTY and QWERTY each time I went on someone else computer, which happened often, I had to switch, qnd it is qnnoying.

You can learn to touch type but keep in mind that not all layouts are the same, you can bring your own keyboard, change the mapping, etc... There are solutions, but it wasn't worth it for me, so I got back to that terrible AZERTY keyboard because that's what everyone has in France.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#82
post #2

There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no. One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing t…

I live in France but use QWERTY instead of AZERTY, and I once had an opposite problem: on a French website, there was an for phone number, validating that it stays [0-9] on each keystroke.

The validation was done by checking for the AZERTY-specific key combos that result in 0-9; on AZERTY to get a you need to press SHIFT+.

So if you had a QWERTY keyboard, you could not enter your phone number, the input stayed blank. (If you tried with SHIFT, you could get !@#$%^&*(() to the field however.)

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#83
post #2

There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no. One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing t…

There was a comment the other day in the discussion about incorporation in Germany. Someone complained that in Germany, they conduct their business in German: the justification was, it's our country, our language, get used to it.

Maybe the blunt response to complaints about the US American bias is, it's our software, our (ASCII/Unicode) language, get used to it.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#85
post #18
post #2

There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no. One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing t…

As multilingual user constantly switching between 3 languages, that's why I fully committed to the US_intl keyboard layout a while ago and ditched the abomination that is QWERTZ. Took a while to get used to, but overall it has been a very noticeable improvement. One layout to cover all languages, no more constant switching. Edit for clarity: I type "a to get ä and 'a to get à. If I want to type actual quotes followed…

Do you pick the "a for an umlaut? It seems like :a would be be typed less commonly than "a, so less need to confirm the punctuation.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#86
post #18
post #2

There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no. One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing t…

As multilingual user constantly switching between 3 languages, that's why I fully committed to the US_intl keyboard layout a while ago and ditched the abomination that is QWERTZ. Took a while to get used to, but overall it has been a very noticeable improvement. One layout to cover all languages, no more constant switching. Edit for clarity: I type "a to get ä and 'a to get à. If I want to type actual quotes followed…

That’s quite memorable. On the Mac I have to press option-u and then a, u, or o to get an ä, ü, or ö. Optionally holding the shift key to get an uppercase vowel with the diacritic.

option-` is for grave (è) option-i is for circumflex (é) option-n is for eñe (ñ) option-c is for cédille (ç)

When you called QWERTZ an abomination I simply had to upvote your comment.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#87
post #18
post #2

There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no. One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing t…

As multilingual user constantly switching between 3 languages, that's why I fully committed to the US_intl keyboard layout a while ago and ditched the abomination that is QWERTZ. Took a while to get used to, but overall it has been a very noticeable improvement. One layout to cover all languages, no more constant switching. Edit for clarity: I type "a to get ä and 'a to get à. If I want to type actual quotes followed…

Yup, did the same. And the layout I happen to work with also has a third layer (menu button) that includes äöüß--that was a glorious discovery.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't. I live in Muenchen, not München. When strictly needed, CTRL+C/CTRL+V from a Google search makes the trick. When writing email/docs, autocorrector for the win. Same thing in Italian: `e instead of è. Although, the German replacement is cleaner, I'd say.

> I live in Muenchen, not München As someone from Espanya, I welcome you to the club.

Interestingly that's the Catalan spelling.

Re: The plague of emoji insertion in French docs

#90

This space before the colon and other marks in French should actually be a narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) [0]. There's no key for it in the AZERTY layout. This has been a problem since the typewriter age. People having to get on with their jobs coped with it by using a full, breaking em-space. Unless this gets replaced automatically by the word processor, you get horrid typography and misplaced line breaks all ov…

This sounds like it's not actually true? If it was, the French code page 646 that we used until Unicode finally won would have included a narrow space, but it doesn't. "Regular" computer text in French has only ever used a normal space, even if handwriting and/or "true" typesetting using typesetting solutions like TeX or PageMaker etc. allowed for a narrow space.

Codepages are from back in the era of little memory available and monospaced fonts.

And another "US English" centered thing; spacing does not really matter in English, but can have functional differences in other languages and scripts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yWWFLI5kFU is a fun look at one of the problems with Unicode in general.

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