French improved keyboard

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Example - French improved keyboard (contributed by Gilbert Galéron)

Layout file: Français (clavier enrichi - virgule).zip

Sticker map: Français (Clavier enrichi - virgule) xls.zip

Note: this layout is published courtesy of Mr. Gilbert Galéron, who originally created it as part of the initiative Accentuez mon nom.

You can use the Demo version to test this example, Player edition to deploy it in its original form, or Full or Lite edition to deploy a modified version.

Standard French keyboard layout shipped with Windows suffers from numerous deficiencies: it does not support upper-case versions of French accentuated letters (É È Ç À Ù). Other characters commonly used in French language are also missing, like ligatures "ae" and "oe" (æ Æ œ Œ), double angle quotation marks («, ») etc.

The "enriched' French keyboard fixes these problems, and has other nice features:

Separate Mapping for Caps Lock setting is used to make accentuated letters é è ç à ù produce upper-case versions É È Ç À Ù without disrupting other functions of the respective keys.
AltGr state produces many additional useful characters: ligatures æ and œ, various quote types in "left" and "right" versions (« » “ ” ‘ ’), long dashes (– —) and other special characters (e.g. ® ¤ ‰ ¿ ¡).
Numeric keypad in conjunction with AltGr produces fractions ¼ ½ ¾ and arithmetic operators ÷ × ¬ ±.
Modifier position AltGr+Shift (not used in original French layout) provides upper-case versions of letters available in AltGr state (Æ Œ Ø Þ Ñ)
Circumflex (^) dead key is extended to transform ordinary digits 0 1 2 3 into superscripts º ¹ ² ³.

The accompanying Excel document Français (Clavier enrichi - virgule) xls.zip contains stickers for all keys - you can simply print it out, cut individual stickers and glue them to corresponding key caps.

KbdEdit example French improved upper case majuscules É È Ç À Ù

Producing uppercase É È Ç À Ù using "Separate Mapping for Caps Lock"

KbdEdit example French improved extra characters in AltGR state

Additional characters in AltGr state

KbdEdit example French improved extra characters in SHIFT + AltGR state

Upper case versions in Shift + AltGr state

KbdEdit example French improved superscript 1 2 3 using dead key character

Using dead keys to produce superscript digits 0 1 2 3

KbdEdit example French improved key sticker map xls Excel

Sticker map from the accompanying Excel document Français (Clavier enrichi - virgule) xls.zip

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