Only recently one of our computer technicians found a solution to a computer conundrum that had been a long-running problem for many of my students and for me as well.

Up until recently, only Macintosh computers permitted one to view an on-screen keyboard display of a keyboard reassigned for French, German, Spanish, or some other language. Up to now users of Windows who attempted to type on a reassigned keyboard for international languages were forced into the tedium of test typing each key to determine which keys were reassigned. Whether one worked on Macintosh or Windows, reassigning the keyboard facilitates typing the special symbols and diacritical characters of a language. To create one character only requires a simple one or two keystrokes, as opposed to a tiresome three or four keystrokes to accomplish the same.

Our technician's solution involved locating a Windows XP and Windows 2000 on-screen keyboard display, which I immediately downloaded and used. Although the Windows on-screen keyboard display is a welcome and useful tool for languages, I will continue to use primarily Macintosh computers for creating German, French, and Spanish materials and presentations, given the Mac's still greater flexibility for international languages. In Word for Windows, for some very common language characters (the Euro symbol and German/Polish quotation marks), one must resort to selecting the menu Insert > Symbol to call up the character chart, and from that chart select a character, and click insert. Tedious! Having these characters readily available under the Apple menu > Key Caps (in OS 8x-9.2ÑI think it is under a different menu in 10.2) is a veritable time-saver. Even though the character chart also exists in Word for Macintosh, the chart does not include Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew characters as does Word for Windows. However, Key Caps, to which I have added Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, and other language fonts (available in Apple's web site and other locations), remains less cumbersome in everyday use.

It should also be mentioned that after using Macintosh for fourteen years (I bought a Mac Plus in 1988), the Key Caps layout for the reassigned German and Spanish keyboard has been consistently the same, regardless of which Mac I used. I cannot say the same for Windows. To create an acute accent over a vowel on some Windows computers with a keyboard reassigned for Spanish requires typing apostrophe, releasing the apostrophe key, and then typing the needed vowel. To create the very same character on other Windows computers with Spanish reassigned keyboards requires a different key sequence: left bracket, release, vowel. This one example of the lack of consistency between different Windows-based computers makes their use confusing for students of international languages as well as their teachers.