Parents need help with their new iMac keyboard!

[scotty56]

Hey all, my parents just bought their first imac and are trying to learn everything about it. But this can be difficult to do when the keyboard is giving them problems.

What they've told me is that when they hit shift+? they get an underscore. But when they hit just the ? with nothing else they get the slash. I tried taking them through system prefs over the phone, but I couldn't find anything useful. Any Ideas? Thanks guys!

BTW while I was typing this they called me, and they found that not only is the ? not working, but ALL buttons on the number row are not giving the right commands with shift+ whatever...

[mackindergarten]

Hi!

They have probably changed the keyboard layout. I wrote a post over at Mac Kindergarten (http://mackindergarten.com/2008/02/29/your-mac-goes-international-symbols-and-foreign-characters/) on exactly that topic.

Hope this will help.

/Rupert

[scotty56]

So should I tell them to switch "US extended unicode" for "US Roman?" Im still a little confused.

[mackindergarten]

For the ? sign it's the same, the ? sign is on the same key on both layouts. You can also tell them to bring up the Keyboard Viewer (how-to with screenshots in my post) so they can see for themselves, which key is going to produce which symbol.

/Rupert

[scotty56]

Is this for Leopard? Because I cannot find the keyboard viewer anywhere, even after searching in spotlight and the finder. I can get to the point when the US flag is up top, but then the drop down menu does not give me the keyboard viewer option. Nor is it even anywhere in my international settings..

[mackindergarten]

Hi!

Keyboard viewer is in Tiger and Leopard (as far as I can verify). In International you have the list off all input layouts - at the top there is Keyboard Viewer and Character Palette. If you look at my post (http://mackindergarten.com/2008/02/29/your-mac-goes-international-symbols-and-foreign-characters/), it's the third screenshots (after 2 keyboard screenshots).

/Rupert

[scotty56]

I still think I don't have it.

[mackindergarten]

That's odd. Take a look at these Applescripts (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20051022020253863) and run them.

What version of Mac OS X are you running?

[scotty56]

leopard 10.5.2. And I just spoke with them again and apparently they called Apple and everything is fine now. Thanks for all your help with this, my keyboard is working fine but do you think I still need those links for my machine?

[mackindergarten]

The Apple scripts are only to launch the Keyboard Viewer without going into the "flag" menu. I don't think you need them, although I'm interested in why you don't have these checkboxes in your International preference pane.

Anyway, I'm happy everything works for your parents now.

/Rupert