Episode: 3175
Title: HPR3175: International Keyboard
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3175/hpr3175.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:15:16

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3175 for Friday 2 October 2020. Today's show is entitled
International Keyboard. It is hosted by Ahuka and is about 11 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is
how I learn to implement a keyboard that lets me type in Spanish.
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Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio Episode 3175 for Friday 2 October 2020.
Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio and welcoming you to another exciting episode.
Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio and welcoming you to another exciting episode
and this I'm going to wrap up my Spanish tools with taking a look at the International
Keyboard because one of the things if you want to start doing things online is you got
to be able to type and I had to figure out how to type in Spanish on my American English
computer. The answer turned out to be quite simple and really just involves software. There's
a setting you can make to switch your keyboard to International Keyboard and there are both
British and American versions available. So I went to a Wikipedia site, link in the
show notes and printed out the keyboard layout for the U.S. International, U.S. English,
International Keyboard and I suspect after a bit of practice I'll get used to it but it's
that it's so simple and I've already discovered it won't take long at all but I got the print
out sitting here on my desk to help me and I'll give a shout out to someone, one of my contacts
on Macedon who pointed me in this direction at Peelum at Octadon.So if you haven't tried
out Macedon, give it a try. It's good people there. So first of all, my main driver is
KDE. I use Kobuntu, which is the KDE version of Ubuntu. So right now I'm still on 18.04.
I have not been offered the upgrade yet but it should be coming shortly. So to make the
software change I went into my system settings in my Kobuntu 1804 machine then went to input
devices, keyboard, and then layouts and then I clicked on configure layouts. Now the way KDE
does this is everything is grayed out until you click on configure and then it becomes live and you
can do stuff. Now in the first dropdown that you get make sure that it says any language and in
the second one the layout for your existing keyboard. Now for some reason mine said APL at the
beginning so I had to change it to English U.S. to get this to work the way I wanted to.
If you're already says English U.S. you're halfway there or if you're in the UK look for
English UK then you pick your variant and for the variant I picked English U.S. International Alt
GR Unicode Combining which is a mouthful but it's what I needed and then you can add a label
and I picked INT as the obvious one. Click OK and you should now see a line added that has the
alternate. Now after you do that you then need to click apply in the lower right and that's
important that you don't skip this step or the thing that you're already done you're not.
Now after this go to the advanced tab click configure keyboard options and scroll down to
switching to another layout and pick a keyboard shortcut for that. Now I picked left control plus
left shift. Again make sure you click apply on the lower right. Now if you've done this correctly
all of this you should see a new indicator appear in the bottom tray or at least mine is the
bottom tray with KDE maybe yours is at the top or the side but there being indicator that suddenly
pops up and it may say something like U.S. or I.M.T those being the two options that I have anyway
and then you can sit there and press the shortcut remember the shortcut is left control plus left
shift I can press those and just watch it flip back and forth. Now how does it work when you're
in the international and the thing is that it's the alt key on the right is now dedicated to producing
international characters. For example many European languages have the letter n which we
inherited from the Romans but Spanish has an additional letter other languages don't called the
enya which is an n with a tilde over it. Now with my keyboard in the international setting all I
do is hold down the right alt key and press n and I get an enya couldn't be easier.
Some other Spanish characters are equally easy. In Spanish questions tend to have an inverted
question mark at the beginning of the question plus the usual question mark at the end well how
do you get that inverted question mark. Hold down the right alt key and press the question mark key.
Same thing with exclamation. In Spanish an exclamation or an emphasized statement would have an
inverted exclamation mark at the beginning. Again the right alt key plus the exclamation mark
gives you an inverted one. Then there tend to be lots of accents in Spanish.
vowels that are accented and that can happen for several reasons. Sometimes it distinguishes between
two words that are spelled the same but have a different meaning. Like l means v or l means he
well which is it. Well if it has an accent it means he. If it doesn't have an accent it means v.
And then accents are frequently placed on vowels to tell you this syllable needs to receive the
emphasis. So for all of these you just you hold down the vowel I mean you hold down the right
alt key then hit the vowel and you will get the vowel with the accent.
Easy peasy. Now there's more than just that. There's other languages covered here. There are
versions of a-o and u that have umlouts on them for those with the need for German. There's some
Scandinavian characters and I have to admit I can't tell you the names of those. Also you've got
some currency symbols like the euro, the pound, the yen. So this is generally useful if you have
any need for these things. Now that I know how to do it I will always have this option available on
any computer I have. And I'm going to tell you how I do that. So moving on. Although
Cappunto is what I use most of the time. I do have one windows box around for things like gaming
um and as I mentioned last time I have an iTunes installation. It was good for getting some
podcasts I couldn't get any other way. So I thought it was worth taking a look at how to add a new
keyboard layout there. To begin click on the start button in the lower left then settings click on
time and language then click language select English parentheses United States and click options.
Then you go to the keyboard section on the bottom click on add a keyboard and go to United States
International. When this is added you will see a new indicator on the bottom taskbar. It will say
ENG space US but if you click on it a pop-up window will open that lets you switch.
So if you switch to the international keyboard the indicator will change to ENG space INTL.
From here everything works just the same as it did with KDE. The right alt key will let you add
all of the special characters. Now I have an old Linux laptop but it's not only old it is large
and heavy. So about a year ago I purchased a Chromebook to replace both the laptop and my Android
tablet that died and I've really been very happy with it. It has worked out well for me and I
decided to implement the international keyboard here as well and it's quite easy. Open the laptop
go to the bottom right and click on the time. This will pop up a window and in that window there's
a settings button. Click that then scroll down to advanced. Go to languages and input
and when you click that that opens a window there and the very top setting is also called languages
and input and in the bottom of that area is manage input methods. Open that and put a check mark in
the box for US International Keyboard. As soon as you do you will see a new indicator on the bottom
tray called the shelf in Chromebook. It'll say US because right now that's the default.
If you want to change that you click the back button to go to the input methods area where you
just came from and you will now see two keyboards. Click the one you want enabled. If you select the
US International Keyboard the indicator on the bottom tray will now read INTL instead of US.
Now having to go through all of this to change keyboards each time is a little annoying but you
don't have to. If you take a look on the bottom there's a button that says show input options on
the shelf. That will turn the indicator on the shelf into a clickable button marked IN for input
that lets you select your keyboard. So I now have the International Keyboard installed on all of my
computers. That's a good thing. It should help me with my learning of Spanish.
And so this is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off and as always encouraging you to support
free software. Bye bye.
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