CSA keyboard
The CSA keyboard, or CAN/CSA Z243.200-92, is the official keyboard layout of Canada. Often referred to as ACNOR, it is best known for its use in the Canadian computer industry for the French ACNOR keyboard layout, published as CAN/CSA Z243.200-92.
Canadian Multilingual Standard on Windows is based on this standard, with a few differences. IBM has also developed a layout based on the CSA keyboard, called Canadian French IBM ID-445. Apple has used this layout as their default French Canadian keyboard since the 1990s.
ACNOR is an acronym of the former French name of the CSA Group, a standards organization headquartered in Canada. The initialism CSA is now used in both official languages.
Description
The standard has undergone some changes but remains focused on the principle of eliminating dead keys as much as possible, using dedicated keys for ÇÈÀÉÙ. For example, the dead key for the cedilla on the old Canadian French IBM ID-058 keyboards was replaced in the primary group with a key that directly types C-cedilla, since it is the only letter in French with this diacritical mark. The cedilla key is still present in the secondary group 2a in the Canadian standard. It is possible to completely do without the dead key for the grave accent, as the only three French letters that use it are directly accessible in both lowercase and uppercase on this keyboard. However, the grave accent remains in the primary group to type the characters ù/Ù on an ANSI keyboard, which lacks a key to the left of the Z key. In Figure 2, the rectangles indicate a diacritical mark.The Canadian standard defines three explicit compliance levels and one implicit level:
- Compliance level A includes the characters from Group 1 for writing in French and English, excluding the œ Œ Ÿ symbols from Group 2b, which are not supported by the ISO 8859-1 standard.
- Compliance level B must include the characters from Group 2a, in addition to those from Group 1, while being limited to the characters of the ISO 8859-1 standard. Characters from Group 2b go beyond the compliance level B of the national standard.
- Compliance level C corresponds to the full version, allowing for the typing of every character from ISO 8859-1, extending support to all characters from ISO 6937, strictly. Compliance level C requires a custom driver that integrates all required characters.
- Finally, the Canadian standard had an "implicit" compliance level that does not conform to the previous levels. In such cases, the standard states that it defaults to level A. A keyboard compliant with the ISO 8859-15 standard, for example, would require the removal of certain characters in Group 2a, such as fractions ¼½¾, in order to include the œ/Œ ligatures and the Ÿ from Group 2b. The ANSI version is only compliant with level A of the national standard, as the broken vertical bar, part of Group 2a, is missing. In fact, only ISO keyboards can achieve compliance level B and C.
The ring-above symbol, which should not be confused with the degree sign and the ordinal indicator, is part of Group 2b, while the characters å and Å from Swedish, produced by combining ring-above and a/A, are in Group 2a. For the macron, the standalone character is part of Group 2a, but accented characters like ā/Ā are considered scholarly letters, which go beyond level B compliance. These characters are present in the ISO 6937 standard but not in the ISO 8859-1 standard. Indeed, the use of this character as a diacritical mark allows writing only in a language other than the 14 officially supported languages on keyboards conforming to level B compliance. The standalone macron character is included in the ISO 8859-1 standard. In Figure 2, these two symbols are coloured purple, as they provide access to at least one character in Group 2a. The symbol, produced by combining diaeresis and Y, is in Group 2b, while , produced by combining diaeresis and , is in Group 1. For more details, the official document includes a detailed list of the characters from Groups 1, 2a, and 2b.
ISO 9995-3
The ISO 9995-3 standard specifies the placement of the Outdated Common Secondary Group and characters on a key. The standard can serve as a reference for including a subgroup of characters in a layout that goes beyond the level of conformity described by the Canadian standard CSA Z243.200-92. Certain characters from group 2b or others not integrated into the CSA standard, such as the euro sign, can be included by referring to them as a subgroup of the ISO 9995-3 standard, in addition to the supported level of conformity.ISO 9995-7
In Part 7 of the ISO 9995 standard, standardized pictograms provide neutral and efficient labeling, avoiding the need to transcribe legends in both French and English. These symbols have also, for the most part, been integrated into Unicode for several years. The symbol for selecting level 3 is represented in the ISO 9995-7 standard with two overlapping arrows, resembling a Christmas tree. The selection key for group 2 is an arrow pointing to the right. The government standard for the Quebec public service SGQRI-001 requires the use of standardized pictograms following the ISO 9995-7 standard or function key labelling in French only in its calls for tenders. The Canadian TBITS-5 standard also recommends this at the federal level. The CSA Z243.200-92 standard, on the other hand, does not require the use of pictograms for labelling function keys. However, the use of the pictogram for the non-breaking space bar is mentioned in the document.The labelling of dead keys with rectangles and the soft hyphen in parentheses, goes beyond Canadian and Quebec standards.
''Notes : Number of the pictogram corresponding to the ISO 9995-7 standard, followed in order by its definition, the ISO 7000 or IEC 417 number, and the Unicode character for entering it on the computer. Some pictograms require the installation of a compatible font.''