Six good reasons why you should update your old AZERTY

Satisfy Breton speakers' needs.

The C’HWERTY keyboard has four new and distinctive keys C’H CH Ù and Ñ which are really needed for a user-friendly text input in Breton. The other diacritic characters of the language (ê, ü …) can be caught more classically by pressing the dead key of the accent needed (^ ¨ ´ `) before pressing the key of the base character to modify. For instance, the ê of kêr can be traditionally caught by pressing successively the characters ^ and e.

The spelling systems supported are unified Breton as well as the inter-dialectal system. The " Brest university system " and the " vannetais ", which appear less and less used nowadays, will not take any substantial profit of these new features.

All the meta-keys of the C'HWERTY keyboard are printed in Breton. Not only a real tool for promoting the Breton language, it will also respond to all your needs in computer assisted data inputs … 

Enhence the AZERTY keyboard and satisfy the French speakers.

The C'HWERTY keyboard handles the latest international norm " ISO-8859-15 " (Latin-9) and allocates a key or gives a direct access to € œ Œ and Ÿ. Other ISO-8859-1 characters, previously forgotten by the AZERTY keyboard but really necessary in French as æ Æ Ç « » have also their dedicated key.

Examples of French words including the œ ligature:

Bœuf, cœlome, cœlacanthe, cœliaque, cœur, chœur, fœtus, manœuvre, mœurs, nœud, œcuménisme, œdème, œdipien, œil, œillade, œillets, œnologie, œsophage, œuf, œuvre, sœur, vœu, stœchiométrie, …

Examples of places of Brittany including the œ ligature:

Plœmel, Plœmeur, Plœren, Plœuc-sur-Lié, Paimbœuf, Le Fœil, Bonnœuvre, Hœdic, Tresbœuf, ...

Examples of French words coming from Latin including the æ ligature:

Lætitia, ex-æquo, curriculum vitæ, ægosome, cæcum, uræus, æsthésiomètre, cælostat, cæruleum, cæsium, dæmonorops, althæa, cobæa, æschne, æpyornis, cæcal, mélæna, æthuse, et cætera, …

The « and » characters are the French guillemots and are not directly and easily accessible from an AZERTY keyboard. Some software like the word processor Microsoft Word, can replace the ", English guillemot or double quote, by its French equivalents but this treatment is rarely handled by common software.

Let's recall again that the capitals É and Ç are also not directly accessible from the French AZERTY keyboard. Only the automatic correction of the text by your software can render properly these characters, for example if one of this letter is the first one of a word located at the beginning of a sentence.

The Ÿ is only used in French proper nouns, mainly towns or family names like the well known MOŸ, HAŸ-LES-ROSES or LOUŸS, CROŸ … 

Do this test... type this little reference text from your French AZERTY keyboard:

LEÇON DE FRANÇAIS PAR LÆTITIA LEBŒUF-JUŸ

OÙ QU'IL RÉSIDE, À NÎMES OU MÊME À CAPHARNAÜM, TOUT FRANÇAIS INSCRIT AU RÔLE, PAIERA SON DÛ (12.345.678,90 Euros (€), DÈS AVANT NOËL, QU'IL SOIT NAÏF OU RÂLEUR

Handle correctly all the Celtic languages diacritics.

With the C'HWERTY keyboard you can access very easily all the diacritics of the 6 Celtic languages. It handles the norm ISO-8859-14 " Latin-8 " which has officially standardized the latest diacritics codes that were not yet defined. These special characters, which are available by default for the main majority of them with the operating systems Windows NT4/2000/XP, are: 

"Super Unified" Breton

Unified Cornish [needs a UNICODE Latin Extended-B font for the y macron. cf. FAQ]

Irish Gaelic 

Older Irish Gaelic [needs a UNICODE Latin-8. font cf. FAQ]

Manx Gaelic

Scottish Gaelic

Welsh

The C’HWERTY keyboard allows a friendly input of all these characters. As an example, it will render properly the older Irish character ¢ via the key combination . + b or the Welsh character w circumflex via ^ + w as well.

The same key combinations on an AZERTY keyboard would produce .b or ^w! The macron dead key ¯ and dot above . are new ones. They allow the input for Cornish and older Irish diacritics.

Example of Gaelic text (click on the text):

Handling of the indivisible space.

With this keyboard you can easily insert an indivisible space by pressing the key combination " SHIFT+ALTGR+SPACE BAR ". This feature is useful if you wish to have one segment of your text indivisible at the level of its spaces.

In particular if you publish WEB pages, it will avoid that a character located at the end of a sentence, like for example the French guillemot » or the punctuation mark …, gets misplaced at the beginning of the following line. This can occur if your text is read from a computer machine whose screen size or WEB browser size is variable as well as the presence of substitution fonts.  

Handle other numerous European languages.

When using an AZERTY keyboard, you have an access to the French é diacritic character, to the Portuguese characters õ and ã or to the Spanish ñ. Please note that the access to á í ó ú … also required for these latter languages, is definitely missing on this keyboard.

The C'HWERTY keyboard is better tailored to handle the languages that use accented vowels with acute accent. We can list amongst them numerous Latin languages including Gallo, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician, Asturian, Occitan, Frioulian ... but also Dutch, Frisian or Luxemburgish.

Other special characters that can be caught for various european languages:

Access to greek, mathematical and commercial characters …

As a bonus the C'HWERTY keyboard gives a direct access to the ¡ ¿ © ® ¢ ¥ £ characters which can be very useful in certain circumstances.

The following characters are also easily accessible, even if most of them have not been printed on the keys in order not to overload the general aspect of the computer keyboard: