Monday, April 16, 2007

Typing Catalan

Catalan is a co-official language along with Spanish in the region on the Eastern edge of Spain. It uses the same alphabet as Spanish except it has no ñ and adds the digraph l·l (ela geminada).

OS X 10.3 had a Catalan keyboard layout which was identical to Spanish-ISO except for the flag icon. This seems to be no longer present in my 10.4. From my iDisk you can download the Catalan folder, which contains the .keylayout file and the .icns file with the right flag. The layout is almost the same as Spanish-ISO. The middle dot · (U+00B7) which is the standard for producing l·l is at shift + 3. But also included are ŀ (U+0140) and Ŀ (U+013F) at option + o and option + shift + o, in case you want to use these versions for local printing or similar purposes.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Call me stupid, but what do I do with these files afterwards?

Tom Gewecke said...

You put the two files in Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts, logout/login, go to System Preferences/International/Input Menu, check the box for the new layout (plus the box for "show input menu in Finder"), then select the new layout in the "flag" menu at the top right of the Finder, and type away

Anonymous said...

Thanks Tom. Now it happens that there is no logout/login folder in Keyboard Layouts. Actually the folder is empty. Any advice?

Tom Gewecke said...

You put the files in the folder as it is. "logout/login" is shorthand for going to the Apple menu, then down to the last item "Logout....", and then logging back in again. Or you can probably restart with the same effect.

Anonymous said...

It works!!
Thank you so much Tom. Great job!