Monday, November 16, 2009

Three Keyboards for Canadian French

Recently someone asked for a Canadian French keyboard layout, and to my surprise I found that there are at least 3 of them in use, all quite different. Apple provides Canadian French - CSA with OS X, and another one, Canadien Français, with a Quebec flag icon, can be found here. Finally, there is the Canadian French which Apple provided with OS 9. You can get this one from my iDisk.

This graphic shows the differences in the layouts.

3 comments:

Chris Harvey said...

The ‘canadien français’ keyboard is the one I’ve seen around here. From what I remember, the CSA keyboard was supposed to be for both English and French, and was only used in a few government offices. As it is the Mac standard, and the Mac is increasingly popular, I wonder if people are proficient on both the canadien français and the CSA.

joy said...

I know this is ancient - but I'm trying to use these various layouts (primarily "Canadian French CSA") - but where are the punctuation marks now? Question mark, apostrophe, etc... Switching back to a US keyboard every time I need a punctuation mark is a pain! I'm sure they are to be found somewhere...

Tom Gewecke said...

Joy -- you can see which key does what for any layout by using Keyboard Viewer. You activate that by checking its box in system prefs/language & text/input sources and then selecting it from the "flag" menu at the top right of the screen.