AZERTY or QWERTY ?

[Ganymede]

I've only every used QWERTY keyboards.

But now I've got a question: sometimes the special symbols, diacritical, punctuation etc. FRIGGIN MOVE WHILE I'M TYPING! (I don't mean when I'm drunk, that's when the keyboard stays still and the rest of the room moves.)

For instance the brackets for BBCodes are normally situated on the two keys next to the P, ie top right of my keyboard. But all of a sudden I'm typing and I get * instead! Then I have to change to the key in the bottom left, between the Shift and the Z. And I'm always searching for the slash and the questionmark...

If anyone knows what could cause this I would be MOST grateful!

[Fjon]

This probably has to do with your keyboard layout - you must be accidentally changing it. To change it back look for a little two letter code in your taskbar (this is your language bar). In XP it is at the righthand side. If you can't see it you may have to right-click your taskbar -> Toolbars and select it. Click on it and change back to the language you want.

Edit: this may exaplin better than I can:

To switch languages or keyboards from the taskbar

Open Regional and Language Options in Control Panel.
On the Languages tab, under Text services and input languages, click Details.
Under Preferences, click Language Bar.
In the Language Bar Settings dialog box, select the Show additional Language bar icons in the Notification area check box.
Click OK three times.
Click the language icon or the keyboard icon on the taskbar to display a menu.
Click a language or keyboard.


Notes

To open Regional and Language Options, click Start, click Control Panel, and then double-click Regional and Language Options.
The language icon is available only if you have added multiple languages or multiple keyboard layouts in Regional and Language Options in Control Panel.
When inserting text, you can use the keyboard, speech recognition, or handwriting recognition interchangeably without clicking a button.
The letters on the icon represent the active language. For example, EN stands for English.

[Ganymede]

Thanks, I'll have a look, erm... Sunday evening at the earliest. I'm off to Brussels after work, just stopping off at home long enough at home to pick up my jimjams...

[bocky]

I have a portuguese QWERTY keyboard:



I used a AZERTY keyboard in a cybercafe in France once and it was frustrating, I had to search for the letters

BTW, the € symbol is made by pressing AltGr+E or AltGr+5.

[alex77r]

AZERTY

[Angelino]

Mine is QWERTY plus Ñ (I use in spanish) and Ç (I use in catalan).

It's curious... portuguese Ç and 'spanish' Ç are in different situation. Ñ owns the portuguese-Ç situation in spanish keyboard. 'Spanish' Ç it's two keys moving to right from Ñ, next to 'ENTER'.

[wally2cv]

mine is QWERTY, but has some addicional buttons for portuguese like: ç, ~, à, á, ê, õ etc..

One of my friends tried yesterday night to persuade me all the world except France (and so Belgium and germany) uses QWERTY keyboards.
On his mind, the qwerty is the best keyboard...

Germany = QWERTZ !

[ravestorm]

At home I use an Italian QWERTY keyboard, at university an American QWERTY one

Italian QWERTY:

[pipocadoce]

mine is QWERTY

[eddydevries]

Also QWERTY.

[debemaks]

I have Italian QWERTY, but sometime I use German QWERTZ, sometime Russian ЙЦУКЕН, but it's too odd to learn, so I prefer to use the Macedonian ЉЊЕРТЅ with some addings

[Vladislav]

QWERTY in english, ЙЦУКЕН in russian.

Vladislav Frank.

[demontventoux]

I have an AZERTY keyboard.
I hate qwerty

[demoore]

In China they use an american qwerty keyboard. One of the most popular to write chinese characters is to write the pronunciation with latin letters.
The chinese writen with chinese letters is called Pinyin. It's how everybody's learning chinese now.

[ART]

Italian QWERTY.
I would like to try the Dvorak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard