How To Buy French Canadian Keyboard

[CodeAndBunny]

Hi Everyone,

I am an American living in France and I would like to buy a French Canadian keyboard, as it's closer to the original QWERTY US layout. I called the Mac 1 800 number, but someone in Ireland picked up and said in so many words that he has no idea of what I should do.

Does anyone know how I can buy a French Canadian wireless keyboard and have it shipped to France?

 

[stomer]

Does anyone know how I can buy a French Canadian wireless keyboard and have it shipped to France?

Wouldn't a UK keyboard suffice? Or is a French Canadian keyboard closer still to a US keyboard layout?

 

[teleromeo]

I guess the canadian qwerty has some characters needed for typing french on it.
Isn't there a way to get the part number on the Canadian online apple store and then call back to your local apple dealer with that number ?

 

[finalcut]

French canadian keyboard has all the accents éèâ, etc
Did you try on apple.ca/fr ? Maybe they ship in Europe.

 

[stomer]

French canadian keyboard has all the accents éèâ, etc
Did you try on apple.ca/fr ? Maybe they ship in Europe.

I actually went as far as to add the keyboard to my shopping basket and attempt to checkout. Didn't work, the site only accepts Canadian shipping and billing addresses.

If the OP wants an easy way to type accents, then he could just switch the keyboard layout in the System Preferences to Canadian French. It'll still work, even without an actual Canadian keyboard.

Also, I'm not sure the OP is aware of 'dead keys'. It's very simple to add acute , grave, circumflex and cedilla accents to certain characters:

grave - option+` then character
acute - option+e then character
circumflex - option+i then character
c with cedilla - option+c
umlaut - option+u then character

 

[Yvan256]

I'll have to go with Stomer on this one. Simply add the french-Canadian keyboard to your keyboard setup. I, for example, use a USA keyboard with both the USA and french-Canadian keyboard mappings. Command+Space quickly switches between both layouts.

 

[Abstract]

Yeah, it's a great short-term solution, but if he's typing in French almost 100% of the time, I'd get annoyed rather quickly with a different keyboard. I can barely type in English on a UK keyboard. It's not very different, but the little things do matter when you do it for a long time.

Do you want an external keyboard, or do you want one to replace the one you have on a laptop?

My suggestion is to find a nice, Canadian MacRumours member who has been here a long time, has an avatar, and has thousands of posts, ask him to order a French keyboard for you, give him the money for the keyboard in advance (which requires you to trust a stranger), and have him send it to you. You pay for postage, of course.

I'd help you if I was in Canada right now.

 

[Bdx33]

look here:
http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObj...=home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/mice_keyboards
there are all kinds of keyboards.

 

[The Stig]

You could look for one on ebay.ca

If you can't find one there. You could find a nice person in Canada (we're all nice up here) to buy one for you. Get it shipped to them and then ship it to you. It would take a while while and cost more for shipping but you'd get one.

The Stig

 

[CodeAndBunny]

WOW! I didn't think anyone would be able to respond and I wake up to find so many helpful comments and responses here! Yay! And you're right on various points, I could use different dead keys and what have you, but if you type tons in French, it gets annoying after a while. The French Canadian keyboard is nearly identical to the US layout and would allow me easy access to accents and what have you.

And yep, they don't let you order it online if it's not being shipped to/bought from a Canadian address (I have no idea why that is)... I called them and they managed to send it out to me as a courtesy, but only to my US address. I can have it rerouted to France, I guess.

Thanks everyone for your kind input; I appreciate it!