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Sender: Gerald Reno <glreno@afterlife.ncsc.mil>
Subject: Spanish Input Methods

I am in the process of porting a tool from OpenWindows to Motif; unfortunately,
this means that I have to actually write input methods for Spanish accented
characters. Fortunately, the tool isn't in use yet, so I can change it to use
a different method -- I never liked OpenWindows three key compose sequence.

My question is: what is the standard? How to native speakers type in Latin
America and Spain? Do they tend to ignore the accents, or actually use something
like OpenWindows' compose-character-accent sequence? Or something more
reasonable like alt-a to get an accented character?

Spanish speakers: Given the choice of everything, what would you use? What is
the de facto standard?

Jerry Reno (of course, I don't speak Spanish) glreno@afterlife.ncsc.mil

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awoodhull@hamp.hampshire.edu answers:

I have considerable experience working in Nicaragua. My impression is that
for rough work, or notes to be sent by e-mail, accents and such may be
ignored, but normally they are used, taking advantage of whatever the
software provides. In Nicaragua this usually means either using the DOS
Spanish keyboard or the facilities built into WordPerfect.

I was teaching an Operating Systems course and a simple but useful
assignment for my students was to write a filter program that would
convert a vowel followed by an apostrophe into the 8 bit accented
character in the IBM set, an n + ~ into the enye, and ? + ^ or ! + ^
into the corresponding inverted characters. It demonstrates the Unix
filter concept, and is also useful as a way of dealing with these
characters in many environments that don't handle 8 bit characters.

Albert S. Woodhull, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, USA
awoodhull@hamp.hampshire.edu
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schuyler@rest.tasc.com answers

The IBM-compatible machine keyboards I used in Costa Rica have a separate
key for the n-tilde ('enye'), which is approximately where the ';' key
is on our Sun5 keyboard (and many other keyboards in the US and other
places).  The acute accent or diaresis (umlaut-looking thing) over
vowels was achieved by a two-key sequence:  First the accent, then the
vowel.  If an incompatible character was typed after the accent-key,
then nothing was returned by the keyboard, and a beep was generated.
The keyboard had more characters/functions than would fit
two-to-a-key, so the Alt key was used to get to a third character on
some keys.

Now, when the two-store sequences are legal, a single-byte character
is produced (the accented characters are not REALLY compositional).  I
assume the same is true in other languages.

--Carl

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luism@sybase.com (Luis Miguel) answers:

Jerry:

	Make no mistake about it, accents ARE used in Spanish !!!
	Software for the Spanish speaking market MUST support entering
	and displaying accented (and other diacritic marks) characters.

	I recommend that you use the conventions used by the major
	word processors in the PC world, like WordPerfect.
	Most Spanish speking computer users have been taught on these,
	and will appreciate the compatibility.

/Luis

Luis Miguel. Replication Server Engineering, Sybase Inc.
internet: luism@sybase.com
at&t: (510) 922-8023
FAX:  (510) 922-5335
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avine.osbu_north@xerox.com answers:

To expand on Carl Schuyler's description:
The accent-key which does not produce video output (i.e. an accent) until a
letter-key is pressed is commonly referred to as a dead-key.  This is helpful
to know in case you're looking it up.
This 2-key combination character produces a single-byte character in this, the
PC, context for all relevant languages.  They manifest themselves in
DOS-codepages.  I have not heard anything about this particular combination on
UNIX systems.
The Alt key used to produce a 3rd character from a key is on the right hand
side only, as far as I've experienced.  The left seems to be reserved for
functions.

-Andrea
avine.osbu_north@xerox.com
software internationalization and localization consultant (can you say that 3
times fast?)
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poc@usb.ve answers:

Well, it depends :-)

The three-key 'compose' hack is horrible and no-one I know uses it by
choice.

In Emacs I tend to use Emacs' "iso-accent-mode" which gets you
accented and other Latin-1 characters via the sequence:

	' a (for an accented "a") and so on.

This is cognate with what Spanish typewriters have, except that of
course they have a real "accent" key and not just an apostrophe, so
you need "' '" to get an apostrophe and so on - ie the "'" is acting
like an Escape.

I guess an Alt-a combination would be acceptable. A Meta-a combination
would definitely not be, since it's already overloaded for Emacs.

There was a big fuss in Spanish-speaking countries a few months ago
when Spain protested an EC directive which would (apparently, I
haven't read it) have outlawed certain keys just as the Spanish "enye"
(the 'n'-with-a-squiggle, which incidently is not an accented "n" but
a separate letter). This was widely seen as cultural imperialism and
many self-appointed defenders of Spanish cultural heritage had a field
day. I mention this to illustrate how important it is not only to find
a good technical solution but also to avoid hurting people's feelings.

Patrick O'Callaghan			Internet: poc@usb.ve
Departamento de Computacion		NICNAME: PO22
Universidad Simon Bolivar 		Tel: +058 (2) 906 3242, 906 3254
Sartenejas, Baruta, Edo. Miranda	FAX: +058 (2) 93 71 28
Caracas, Venezuela			"Just messing about in quotes"

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