Keymaps - To latin1 or not to latin1?

zacariaz · 2012-08-19 15:48:50

First of I'm not really much of a newbie and have installed arch and other linux distribution without issues many times, but when it comes to keymaps, I've never really figured out what latin1 means, and not from lag of trying I assure you.

I believe it has something to do with "dead" keys, whatever that means, but suffice to say I'm confused and have been so for a long time, not least as it seem to make no difference if I use one or the other.

I should mention that I do use a danish keyboard layout and thus have the choice between dk and dk-latin1 and also that the keyboard in question right now is part of the asus eeepc 1015pem, though I have other computers as well and thus would like to know how to make the decision in general and not just for this netbook.

I know it's a rather small issue, but I'm kind of a perfectionist, so please do enlighten me at you earliest convenience.

Best regards.

mariusmeyer · 2012-08-19 17:08:53

I use no-latin1 to get æøå in Norwegian, but I've never really tried anything else because no-latin1 just works. If they both do exactly the same thing on your computer, then that just means that one of the two (probably) has a few more keystroke -> character mappings than the other, for keys you do not have on your keyboard

zacariaz · 2012-08-19 17:15:26

mariusmeyer wrote:

I use no-latin1 to get æøå in Norwegian, but I've never really tried anything else because no-latin1 just works. If they both do exactly the same thing on your computer, then that just means that one of the two (probably) has a few more keystroke -> character mappings than the other, for keys you do not have on your keyboard

In any case I'd like to know what latin1 means exactly.

thisoldman · 2012-08-19 17:50:24

To see the differences, try loading each keymap in turn. With the keymap loaded, in a console, not an X terminal, run 'showkey -a'. Then pressing a key or key-combination will show you the character symbol and the keycodes for that key. 'Ctrl-d' will end the showkey program.

I'm interested to see if Latin1 will have the symbol for the euro (if the font you are using includes the euro). 'man latin1' says says latin1 does not include it but I believe the man page is written for the font encoding and decoding and might not pertain to keymap settings.

Edit:
I tried different settings with loadkeys and quickly ended up with a garbled screen. Fortunately, loadkeys only affected the one virtual console, not the others.

Last edited by thisoldman (2012-08-19 17:56:02)

zacariaz · 2012-08-19 18:06:51

thisoldman wrote:

'man latin1' says says latin1 does not include it but I believe the man page is written for the font encoding and decoding and might not pertain to keymap settings.

I must admit it didn't occur to me to look up latin1 in the man pages, but if t's true that latin1 does not include certain fairly used characters, then I should think that going non latin1 would be the best course of action.

However, i don't think I see that man page you do, but I did find kind of an explanation, simply stating that latin1 is west European layouts, but then the question really is if there is a difference at all, I mean Denmark is a west European country and it would make little sense to pretend otherwise.

So, either I don't understand anything (probably the case) or the two options are likely the same. I suppose it should be simple to do a binary compare, but I honestly don't remember how.

damnit... it's utf-8 vs iso 8859-1 all over again. Never really figured that one out...

cfr · 2012-08-19 18:58:21

Try installing man-pages. Apparently it is part of that package.

If it is like the font encoding, it probably supports many Western European alphabets but not all. I don't know how well it supports Danish but there are some languages which use characters it doesn't support - or doesn't support properly. Basically, for font encodings, it is a question of only having 256 slots for glyphs (in 8 bit encodings - 7 bit were 128 slots). If you take all the characters you need for all Western European languages, you get more than 256...

If you would like to know more than you ever wanted to about encodings, try installing some fonts for traditional TeX/LaTeX for which packages do not yet exist... Mathematics is even more fun....

Last edited by cfr (2012-08-19 18:59:25)

mariusmeyer · 2012-08-19 22:33:23

zacariaz wrote:

(...)if t's true that latin1 does not include certain fairly used characters, then I should think that going non latin1 would be the best course of action.

Why is that? You said earlier that when you tried both you noticed no difference. Remember, a keymap is nothing more than rules telling the computer what to do when you press a key. So maybe dk-latin1 has some mappings fram keys not on you laptop keyboard; you would never notice that, and nothing is "wrong" in choosing the other keymap, because for the keys that actually are on your keyboard, the mappings in the two are identical

zacariaz wrote:

(...)would like to know how to make the decision in general and not just for this netbook.

You should try them both (or all if there are more) and see which one works optimally for you keyboard If you don't miss anything and you can't find any wrong maps, then you have found the one ^^

PS: Keymaps are not like encodings, because you don't end up "missing" special character and the likes; you just don't have keys for greek letters on you danish keyboard, so you can't type them

Arch Linux

#1 2012-08-19 15:48:50

Keymaps - To latin1 or not to latin1?

#2 2012-08-19 17:08:53

Re: Keymaps - To latin1 or not to latin1?

#3 2012-08-19 17:15:26

Re: Keymaps - To latin1 or not to latin1?

#4 2012-08-19 17:50:24

Re: Keymaps - To latin1 or not to latin1?

#5 2012-08-19 18:06:51

Re: Keymaps - To latin1 or not to latin1?

#6 2012-08-19 18:58:21

Re: Keymaps - To latin1 or not to latin1?

#7 2012-08-19 22:33:23

Re: Keymaps - To latin1 or not to latin1?

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