Re: Multilingual keyboard support on Apple IIGS

[CUTblakeney@home.com (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 16 Jan 2000 08:38:43 GMT, supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) wrote:

>I thought the IIGS does this with the standard OS?  I know I
>can type in French and generate all the accented characters
>using option key combinations.
>
>To find out which option key combinations print which of the
>characters and symbols, just use the Video Keyboard NDA.

An even better way to find special symbols in a font that you are
currently using is with the Exotic Characters section of SuperMenuPack
from My eSource (nee Seven Hills).  SuperMenuPack gives you a CDEV
which allows you to enable/disable three features.

1) Heirarchical CDEVs

This turns the Control Panel NDA's menu item in the Apple menu into a
heirarchical menu so you don't have to open the Control Panel NDA
window to get to a particular CDEV.  You just highlight the CDEV you
want from the Control Panel sub menu.  You can still let go of the
mouse button with the Control Panel menu item highlighted to open the
Control Panel window just like you used to.

I use this feature all the time.

2) Pretty Font Menu

As long as you don't have WestCode's TypeSet desk accessory installed,
you can use this feature to have any standard font menu in an
application display each font name using the font that it describes.
This can make some font names unreadable as they might not contain any
letters.

This feature can be handy but I personally don't use it much.

3) Exotic Characters

This feature allows you to hold down the mouse button while pointing
to either the top right or top left corner of the desktop to open a
dialog box that will display all 256 characters in the currently
active font.  You can use this dialog box to find out what key
combinations, using the current Translation setting in the General
CDEV, that will generate a certain symbol.  However, you can also
select a symbol and have it typed for you or you can go to a second
dialog which will allow you to click on characters to add to a line
edit control and then either type the contents of the line edit or
copy the contents to the system clipboard.

This feature is also very handy and even though I don't have a lot of
need for it, it stays active just in case I do need it.  :-)

+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II University in A2Pro on Delphi     |
|                    Delphi Apple II Forums Web Pages                    |
| A2: http://www.delphi.com/apple2   A2Pro: http://www.delphi.com/a2pro  |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+