Detecting ALTGR can only hope to work when AlTGR is in fact there....

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/09/08 04:36 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/09/08/4825659.aspx

Stu and I have a semi-regular debate going these days about an issue that I have covered a bunch of times in the past, for example in all of these posts:

• 28 Dec 2004 "To start press the ALTGR key." Hmm... where's the ALTGR key?
• 21 Apr 2005 Intuitive is in the eye of the beholder  
• 15 Mar 2006 Multilingual keyboards and Microsoft Word 
• 17 Apr 2006 Get off my freaking key!

and so on, you get the point.

Stu and I have gone around and around on this one, believe me.

I point out that is the biggest complaint we get from people having trouble with MSKLC-generated keyboards (at first they claim the AltGr and Shift+AltGr states don't work, then when we ask them try in Notepad they realize that the problem is they do not work in Word).

And he points out that no one seems to be complaining to the Word team on the issue.

So I point out that a lot of these people are creating keyboards so they assume that it is in the tool, first -- and then after I show them otherwise they figure it is a known issue.

And he points out that Word goes to tremendous effort to detect the CTRL+ALT vs. AltGr keystrokes so it can handle these two cases separately.

So I point out that not every key is convenient to shift with the right ALT key that is AltGr, so that some people need CTRL+ALT on the left side to do the same thing.

And he points out that most people don't even know about the CTRL+ALT method of getting at AltGr.

So I point out that not all keyboards have a right ALT key.

And he points out that he hasn't seen such a beast in a long time.

And so on....

Just recently I had a customer and regular reader named Fran who has been a big fan of my various MacBook Pro/Boot Camp posts remind me that my new favorite machine with the superior Vista experience:

has no Right Alt key on it. Doesn't that count?

Well, it certainly does count that it certainly has no Right ALT key:

(though I think the Input Remapper makes the Right Apple key into an AltGr key, which does not help my 64-bit Vista much since the Input Remapper does not work there yet, and not everyone actually uses the Input Remapper (which is not there for Parallels, for example).

I'll be honest, I have been using the MacBook Pro quite a bit lately. It is pretty much the only one I take to meetings where I need a computer and it might be the only one I take with me on vacation later this month.

Sometimes it is booted into Windows, sometimes into OS X.

All this time though, and it was even the machine I originally installed Boot Camp on to investigate the bug I talked about here, and I hadn't been looking at the Word issue (I hadn't even installed most of Office on Vista yet (I do have Mac Office on the Mac partition, does that count?).

Of course I don't always check out every issue on every machine, but in retrospect it seems like it was a pretty obvious thing to try out. :-)

Of course you can search on the web with simple keywords like Mac AltGr and see thousands of people pointing out the lack of the key and various workarounds, especially for people who are running Parallels or Boot Camp, and some of those pages point out that CTRL+ALT works just fine here.

Though there is that major caveat about using Word, of course....

I am going to install Word 2007 on the machine now, under both Vista 64 bit and Vista 32 bit. So I can test out the detection work in Word. I'll be sure to let everyone know what I find out.

And I know what I'll say to Stu next time I talk to him.... :-)

This post brought to you by ∵ (U+2235, a.k.a. BECAUSE)

# Jan Kučera on 8 Sep 2007 1:33 PM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 8 Sep 2007 2:33 PM:

# Gene on 9 Sep 2007 2:58 PM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 9 Sep 2007 3:23 PM:

# Gene on 10 Sep 2007 2:50 PM:

# passerby on 23 Dec 2008 3:17 AM:

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