QWERTY?? What's the norm?

Hutchism

Leaving for India on tuesday. Just had a thought. Whats the norm for keyboards over there? Qwerty often found?

Remember trying to write an email in Belgium and it took me an hour, though I was quite drunk..

abracax

No problems, India buys its keyboards from China like everybody else...except the Belgians, apparently.

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machadinha

LOL, I know the feeling, yes.

Didn't have much trouble with it in India though. No worries (In other countries including my own, I find it usually pays to shift around across a couple of machines. Not all of them will be set to say Western Berber or something. Asking the proprietors provided they can understand you may likewise be helpful, of course.)

It can be a real b*tch though just wanting to check your mail or using a forum like this, as the keyboard may look alright to you, but then the finesses of those funny characters you use for your passwords may just not match. Aaargh &^%.

(Again though: I don't think it gave me any trouble in India, ever. Well, you may find some popular machines in some areas set to e.g. Hebrew, I guess. Again, there'll normally be a standard one next to it.)

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Hutchism

Awesome, thanks for that. I believe there are a few different types of keyboard that are popular around the world. Just glad I don't have to learn how to type again in India!

machadinha

I forget the details but I used to have to have a keyboard that I believe defaulted to US standards yes. For some reason, this is different from what we Western Europeans use.

Funny enough, setting it to Brazilian (of all things ) solved the issue for me.

Nick-H

It's a bit difficult for a keyboad to default to anything. It is the way its keys are laid out! What actually appears on the screen when you type on it will depend on the Windows international settings.

Yes, the US keyboard is different in one or two respects to the British keyboard, but except for the pure touch-typist (and how many touch typists can really claim to be pure? After all, they are but human ) it is easy to adapt. characters like @ and " and maybe \ are in different places, but the alphabet letters are the same.

Across Europe, though, there are a number of keyboard layouts, and certainly nothing standard "Western European". France has to cope with accented characters, Germany has to cope with its B-with-a-tail character (I think; I forget, though, and the worst thing to a Brit about the German keyboard is that Z is swapped with something). If you have a very old DOS manual, you can see diagrams of the standard layouts; I used to use this when I had to do remote-login support for our French and German offices from London.

I used to use an internet cafe in North London where something like Polish seemed to be the standard. The keyboards were normal, but people would change the Windows language. I had to work out how to reset it. In Polish.

The worst thing about a lot of internet-cafe keyboards here is that, regardless of layout, several of the keys won't work!

So far as roman-character keyboards go, the QWERTY layout, with minor variations as mentioned, is international. Unlike Japan, where you are most likely (I guess, from the Japanese I used to work with in London) to be met with a Japanese-character keyboard, you are unlikely to find Indian-language-character keyboards. I've never seen one... I guess they must exist...

capt_mahajan

I learnt how to use an arabic keyboard in Yemen. Not only was the layout unique and in arabic- with no English- but the damn thing wrote from right to left as well.

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dillichaat

I sure hope you knew Urdu, in that case! Worst thing for me is that I've got 2 laptops and 1 desktop in my office, 1 mac urchased here with a qwerty-keyboard, 1 desktop with a Belgian Azerty-layout and 1with a dutch layout, which is again slightly different. You can imagine the results whenever I switch.

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