FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Which capitals for the ch and c’h polygraphs ? CH/Ch C’H/C’h ?
Nothing is really clear in the Breton literature about the way we should write the Breton polygraphs ch and c'h in uppercase. Should we write CH and C’H or Ch and C’h? As a compromise we chose to give an access to the CH and C’H characters when the SHIFT key is pressed but also to C’h and Ch if the meta-key ALTGR is activated. The office for the Breton language « Ofis Ar Brezhoneg » suggests to use rather the forms Ch and C’h, unless you want to write a whole word in capitals (PEMOC’H).
Which « skrab » character for C'H ?
Several characters can be used to render the « skrab » character of the C'H trigraph. We chose, according to the typographical rules followed by Roparz Hémon and Fañch Kervella, to use the right quote, left bended, rather than the common apostrophe. So it will be written Ploumanac’h rather than Ploumanac'h.
Why are the polygraphs not handled by a unique character code ?
The UNICODE consortium recently gave a code to the Dutch digraph IJ (and ij) cf. the town of IJmegen, spelled this way on the panel at the entry of the town. This character whose code is U0132 is unique, this means that it is not composed of the two successive characters I and J.
Can we hope that in the short future the consortium will give its codes to the Breton polygraphs? The answer is likely no, because the consortium recently published a note saying that no more polygraph will be handled unless you can provide them with a really good reason.
Breton is not the only language concerned by this restriction. Gaelic, Slovak but above all Welsh have digraphs in their alphabets. So the consequence here is that when you will press the CH and C'H keys on the C'HWERTY keyboard, several characters will be produced.
Are special fonts necessary to handle the diacritics ?
Yes. If you want to write properly older Irish or the ? character of Unified Cornish, you will need UNICODE Latin-8 compliant or Latin Extended-B compliant fonts, respectively. There are several of them available for free, they can be downloaded on the Internet and are also present on the driver CDROM provided with the C'HWERTY keyboard. For the other diacritics, all the standard fonts, standard but up to date, (Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Comics …) are sufficient nowadays.
- http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html
- http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html
- http://www.slovo.info/unifonts.htm
- http://www.geocities.com/finis_stellae/ng/unicode.html
The ISO-8859-15 norm, UNICODE, Internet and software compatibility.
The ISO-8859-15 norm and UNICODE are emerging norms, and you probably notice it already when using the € character, some older or Anglo-American software do not handle it properly.
There is a hope that in the near future most of the software used in the world will handle correctly these novelties. The coherence of all the data which is bigger and bigger over the Internet will depend on it crucially.
In the meantime, if you have a doubt about the " outdatedness " of your pals' software or hardware there is no magic solution, as a work-around, always prefer to employ EUR instead of € or oe instead of œ etc.
Handling of the other operating systems of the market, Windows NT4, Linux and Macintosh.
Linux and Macintosh (Mac OS X) could be handled in the future. This mostly depends on the demand we shall receive for them.
NT4 is not handled because the windows NT4 kernel does not handle keyboard drivers that define ligatures. (Only 2000 and XP).
The other Windows versions 95/98/ME are correctly handled now : all the features but the handling of foreign characters (Welsh, Esperanto, Irish, ...) are OK. Download explanations here in doc or pdf.