Re: TECH: okay, I'm an idiot

At 05:30 PM 3/29/2000 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>You want to install the US-International keyboard.  Choose Settings->Control
>Panel from the Start button and click on the keyboard icon.  You should see
>the U.S English language installed.  Click Add and choose another
>language.  (In Windows NT and maybe Win98, I don't know, you can choose
>U.S. English a second time, but not in Win95.)  I recommend English (Canadian)
>as the differences are minimal. Click OK.
>Now click Properties to change the keyboard from Canadian Multilingual to
>U.S. International.  Click OK.  You will be prompted for your Windows CD-ROM.
>When complete, you can close the Control Panel.
Thanks a lot for the tip, John! I've been using an alternate keyboard
mapping in Windows for a while, but I wasn't aware that each keyboard that
you 'add' could have its own mapping. Consequently, I've been using the
Portuguese (Brazilian) keyboard and mapping because of all the ones I've
tried, they're the closest to what I'm used to (in fact, the Brazilian
mappings seems exactly the same as US International). But I ran into a
problem in Word when I tried to type a paper in Spanish using the
Portuguese setting, because whenever you change keyboards, Word 'marks' the
text as being that language and consequently the spell-checker gets all
confused. Now that I know how, I've installed a Spanish keyboard with US
International layout, so hopefully my text'll be marked as Spanish now :)

>There is now a small icon "EN" in the system tray (lower left corner by
>default).
>Clicking on it will present a menu.  When you want to use the international
>keyboard, choose "English (Canadian)" from this menu.  The U.S. international
>keyboard is now in effect.  Switch back to "English (U.S.)" to restore the
>normal keyboard.  Be sure to do this before doing anything locale-sensitive
>such as spell checking.
An easy way to switch is to use either left alt and shift or left control
and shift, depending on which one you select in the control panel.