6500cal@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Charles La Via) (04/12/91)
I have been using Hypercard for some time now to create exercises in French, but I have a lingering problem. Making accents is very impractical, especially on the Mac Se models, in which to make an "accent grave" one must use the tilda key in combination with the option key, which if combined inadvertantly can send one backwards one card (as a speed key which is great for the programming but terrible for beginning students who are not familiar with Hypercard. Is there some way to modify the keyboard to eliminate these power (speed) keys so that they don't seend students back one card (or worse) when they are struggling to remember which accent to make???? HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I would appreciate any help Thank-you in advance. Charles La Via 6500cal@ucsbuxa.bitnet
George_Wade@mindlink.bc.ca (George Wade) (04/17/91)
One way to solve your problem may be to use fontographer, a font editing application, to make accents for keys that are not required for other characters. Best search for a "dead" key, one that does not advance the cursor, then the accent will be over the next letter typed. Another solution is to use French system software - we would assume practical placement of accents. Much depends upon the didtribution of your exercises. Do you hope that people on oter campuses may read your exercises? If so; a standard assignment of characters including accents, is helpful. One last idea - something called Mac Key Melon reassigns characters to desired keys. I hope that this gets the ball rolling. As I'm moving house this month I don't have all my references available. George Wade
dlugose@uncecs.edu (Dan Dlugose) (04/18/91)
In article <10481@hub.ucsb.edu> 6500cal@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Charles La Via) writes: > >I have been using Hypercard for some time now >to create exercises in French, but I have a lingering >problem. Making accents is very impractical, especially >on the Mac Se models, in which to make an "accent grave" >one must use the tilda key in combination with the option >key, which if combined inadvertantly can send one backwards >one card (as a speed key which is great for the programming >but terrible for beginning students who are not familiar >with Hypercard. >Is there some way to modify the keyboard to eliminate these >power (speed) keys so that they don't seend students back One solution is to make the script of your HC stacks say (HyperCard 2.0 at least) on commandkeydown x if x is not "t<tilda key>" then pass commandkeydown end commandkeydown -- n.b. between quotes actually type the character; my terminal -- emulation is remapping it to <escape> If that for some reason is not satisfactory, there may be fonts which use other keys for accent marks; perhaps International fonts,\ which is shareware. There is also software for reassigning physical keys to ascii characters. Trouble is, that would tend to affect the hypercard command sequence also. Dan Dlugose Mac consultant, soon to be job hunting! University of North Carolina Educational Computing Service -- Dan Dlugose Internet: dlugose@uncecs.edu UNC Educational Computing Service Box 12035, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2035
foelsche@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Karl Foelsche) (04/19/91)
I have had considerable experience on foreign languages in hypercard. What you want to do is copy over any international resources you find in the French system with Resedit to the system you are currently using. They will look like this: ITL0 INTL1, etc. If you have a copy of inside mac, or you have a friend who knows anything about resedit, then they will be able to help you with this procedure. Good luck.