🚀 go-pugleaf

Don,

Forgive me if there's some reason you've already ruled this out (I
missed your original article) but why can't you use existing fonts for
writing in French?  The only symbol you may have trouble with are the
guillemets (quote marks) if you're using the mail-merge feature.

If you simply want to rearrange your keyboard, there is a product
called MacKeymeleon which allows you to rearrange your keyboard to
suit the standard French layout or your whim or whatever.  I haven't
used this, as I generally don't purchase software with silly names,
but I've heard good things about it from fussy-fingered colleagues.

If you don't like the dead key approach to composing accented
characters---this is essentially what the option-e-<character>
sequence imitates---the fonts sold by Linguist's Software of South
Hamilton, Mass. have diacritics which automatically backspace over the
previous character.  I found this to be great for typing in Greek,
whether this is due to the funky accentuation rules in that language
or the bizarre fast-lane feeling of about five levels of indirection
between your brain and the screen I can't tell.

--
Joe Chapman
harvard!ima!joe