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114 lines
9.5 KiB
Plaintext
114 lines
9.5 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 3175
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Title: HPR3175: International Keyboard
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3175/hpr3175.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:15:16
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3175 for Friday 2 October 2020. Today's show is entitled
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International Keyboard. It is hosted by Ahuka and is about 11 minutes long
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and carries a clean flag. The summary is
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how I learn to implement a keyboard that lets me type in Spanish.
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This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
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Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code
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HPR15. That's HPR15.
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Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
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Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio Episode 3175 for Friday 2 October 2020.
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Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio and welcoming you to another exciting episode.
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Hello, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio and welcoming you to another exciting episode
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and this I'm going to wrap up my Spanish tools with taking a look at the International
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Keyboard because one of the things if you want to start doing things online is you got
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to be able to type and I had to figure out how to type in Spanish on my American English
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computer. The answer turned out to be quite simple and really just involves software. There's
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a setting you can make to switch your keyboard to International Keyboard and there are both
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British and American versions available. So I went to a Wikipedia site, link in the
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show notes and printed out the keyboard layout for the U.S. International, U.S. English,
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International Keyboard and I suspect after a bit of practice I'll get used to it but it's
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that it's so simple and I've already discovered it won't take long at all but I got the print
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out sitting here on my desk to help me and I'll give a shout out to someone, one of my contacts
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on Macedon who pointed me in this direction at Peelum at Octadon.So if you haven't tried
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out Macedon, give it a try. It's good people there. So first of all, my main driver is
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KDE. I use Kobuntu, which is the KDE version of Ubuntu. So right now I'm still on 18.04.
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I have not been offered the upgrade yet but it should be coming shortly. So to make the
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software change I went into my system settings in my Kobuntu 1804 machine then went to input
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devices, keyboard, and then layouts and then I clicked on configure layouts. Now the way KDE
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does this is everything is grayed out until you click on configure and then it becomes live and you
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can do stuff. Now in the first dropdown that you get make sure that it says any language and in
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the second one the layout for your existing keyboard. Now for some reason mine said APL at the
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beginning so I had to change it to English U.S. to get this to work the way I wanted to.
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If you're already says English U.S. you're halfway there or if you're in the UK look for
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English UK then you pick your variant and for the variant I picked English U.S. International Alt
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GR Unicode Combining which is a mouthful but it's what I needed and then you can add a label
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and I picked INT as the obvious one. Click OK and you should now see a line added that has the
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alternate. Now after you do that you then need to click apply in the lower right and that's
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important that you don't skip this step or the thing that you're already done you're not.
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Now after this go to the advanced tab click configure keyboard options and scroll down to
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switching to another layout and pick a keyboard shortcut for that. Now I picked left control plus
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left shift. Again make sure you click apply on the lower right. Now if you've done this correctly
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all of this you should see a new indicator appear in the bottom tray or at least mine is the
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bottom tray with KDE maybe yours is at the top or the side but there being indicator that suddenly
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pops up and it may say something like U.S. or I.M.T those being the two options that I have anyway
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and then you can sit there and press the shortcut remember the shortcut is left control plus left
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shift I can press those and just watch it flip back and forth. Now how does it work when you're
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in the international and the thing is that it's the alt key on the right is now dedicated to producing
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international characters. For example many European languages have the letter n which we
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inherited from the Romans but Spanish has an additional letter other languages don't called the
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enya which is an n with a tilde over it. Now with my keyboard in the international setting all I
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do is hold down the right alt key and press n and I get an enya couldn't be easier.
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Some other Spanish characters are equally easy. In Spanish questions tend to have an inverted
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question mark at the beginning of the question plus the usual question mark at the end well how
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do you get that inverted question mark. Hold down the right alt key and press the question mark key.
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Same thing with exclamation. In Spanish an exclamation or an emphasized statement would have an
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inverted exclamation mark at the beginning. Again the right alt key plus the exclamation mark
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gives you an inverted one. Then there tend to be lots of accents in Spanish.
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vowels that are accented and that can happen for several reasons. Sometimes it distinguishes between
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two words that are spelled the same but have a different meaning. Like l means v or l means he
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well which is it. Well if it has an accent it means he. If it doesn't have an accent it means v.
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And then accents are frequently placed on vowels to tell you this syllable needs to receive the
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emphasis. So for all of these you just you hold down the vowel I mean you hold down the right
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alt key then hit the vowel and you will get the vowel with the accent.
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Easy peasy. Now there's more than just that. There's other languages covered here. There are
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versions of a-o and u that have umlouts on them for those with the need for German. There's some
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Scandinavian characters and I have to admit I can't tell you the names of those. Also you've got
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some currency symbols like the euro, the pound, the yen. So this is generally useful if you have
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any need for these things. Now that I know how to do it I will always have this option available on
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any computer I have. And I'm going to tell you how I do that. So moving on. Although
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Cappunto is what I use most of the time. I do have one windows box around for things like gaming
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um and as I mentioned last time I have an iTunes installation. It was good for getting some
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podcasts I couldn't get any other way. So I thought it was worth taking a look at how to add a new
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keyboard layout there. To begin click on the start button in the lower left then settings click on
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time and language then click language select English parentheses United States and click options.
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Then you go to the keyboard section on the bottom click on add a keyboard and go to United States
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International. When this is added you will see a new indicator on the bottom taskbar. It will say
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ENG space US but if you click on it a pop-up window will open that lets you switch.
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So if you switch to the international keyboard the indicator will change to ENG space INTL.
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From here everything works just the same as it did with KDE. The right alt key will let you add
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all of the special characters. Now I have an old Linux laptop but it's not only old it is large
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and heavy. So about a year ago I purchased a Chromebook to replace both the laptop and my Android
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tablet that died and I've really been very happy with it. It has worked out well for me and I
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decided to implement the international keyboard here as well and it's quite easy. Open the laptop
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go to the bottom right and click on the time. This will pop up a window and in that window there's
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a settings button. Click that then scroll down to advanced. Go to languages and input
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and when you click that that opens a window there and the very top setting is also called languages
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and input and in the bottom of that area is manage input methods. Open that and put a check mark in
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the box for US International Keyboard. As soon as you do you will see a new indicator on the bottom
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tray called the shelf in Chromebook. It'll say US because right now that's the default.
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If you want to change that you click the back button to go to the input methods area where you
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just came from and you will now see two keyboards. Click the one you want enabled. If you select the
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US International Keyboard the indicator on the bottom tray will now read INTL instead of US.
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Now having to go through all of this to change keyboards each time is a little annoying but you
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don't have to. If you take a look on the bottom there's a button that says show input options on
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the shelf. That will turn the indicator on the shelf into a clickable button marked IN for input
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that lets you select your keyboard. So I now have the International Keyboard installed on all of my
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computers. That's a good thing. It should help me with my learning of Spanish.
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And so this is a hookah for hacker public radio signing off and as always encouraging you to support
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free software. Bye bye.
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We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
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Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
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If you ever thought of recording a podcast then click on our contribute link to find out how easy
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it really is. Hacker Public Radio was founded by the Digital Dove Pound and the Infonomicon
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Computer Club and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com. If you have comments on today's show
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please email the host directly leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself
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unless otherwise status. Today's show is released on the Creative Commons
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Attribution ShareLight 3.0 license.
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