Len Warner wrote:

>I use a Dell Latitude portable having a British keyboard layout
>running Win95a with Regional Settings English(British),
>with an external US Windows keyboard.
>
>Using the US keyboard with the English(British) setting
>means that no key gives me a backslash, inconvenient
>because I often write DOS batch commands and
>keying the Alt-key combination is a nuisance.
>(It's more convenient to reach across to the Latitude keyboard.)
>
>So I searched for a file containing a table of characters
>which might be a keyboard map and found C:\Windows\System\Kbduk.kbd,
>which I backed up then patched using Debug to swap the backslash 5CH
>for the grave accent 60H which I never use.

I can't give you a "sophisticated" solution for this, but I think I have a
suggestion. I had always set up my user's machines with the "US" keyboard
language setting, even though I am in Canada. The keyboard layout in
Canada, in my experience, is identical to US ones. Then on one
installation, I decided to choose "Canadian" for the language setting
instead. My customer later called, saying he could not get his backslash
key to work, and also other characters that appear on the American-style
keyboard on the lowest row, right hand side. Instead he got various French
accents.

All I did was change his keyboard setting, in the Windows 98 control panel,
from "Canadian English" to "U.S. English....poof, characters are "normal"
again, for North Americans, anyway. By "normal" I mean that what he sees on
the keys is what appears on the screen. I have never come across a
French-Canadian-specific keyboard, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
(I live in Ontario, one province west of Quebec, where most of the French
speaking population in Canada  is concentrated; I could drive there in
about 6 hours...just for reference to the vast majority of the world that
is NOT near me... ;-)

This suggestion may not be the answer to all your problems, but it's
certainly a straightforwared thing to try, since you are actually an
American style keyboard. The keyboard itself, was listed as a standard
101/104 key or MS Natural type keyboard.

regards
Susan Sutherland
S. Sutherland Computer Consulting

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