default keyboard?

[Kino]

On 7 Jan 2005, at 14:06, Clytie Siddall wrote:

> and for every new string, and often within one string, I have to keep 
> changing back to my Vietnamese keyboard. It persistently defaults back 
> to the Australian English keyboard, probably because it's an 
> English-based install, no Vietnamese-based install being available for 
> Mac.

Presumably because OS X requires at least a Roman keyboard layout to be 
enabled. This is a really annoying and stupid feature. For many 
non-MacRoman users, either pure ASCII is sufficient or MacRoman 
character set is too poor.

> So I waste a lot of time deleting what I've written, changing 
> keyboards again and retyping it. It's really aggravating.
>
> (I already have Vietnamese set as my preferred language, and Google, 
> for example, now presents in Vietnamese, which is great.)
>
> Is there any way I can set my Vietnamese Unicode keyboard as the 
> default one, system-wide, or just for OW?

A workaround is to create a Vietnamese keyboard layout which is treated 
as Roman. I.e. set keyboard group to 0 and set id to a number between 0 
and 16383. Are you using Vietnamese keyboard layout coming with OS X? 
If so,...

1. Download
<http://quinon.com/files/keylayouts/VietnameseRoman-bundle.zip>

2. Expand it and put VietnameseRoman.bundle in
     /Users/you/Library/Keyboard Layouts
(If you don't have the folder, just create it)

3. Log out and log in;

4. Open System Preferences => International => Input Menu and check 
Vietnamese Roman (Roman script);

If you don't notice any problem, you can move it into 
'/Library/Keyboard Layouts' so that it will be available to all users.


As it is treated as a Roman keyboard layout, you can use it in any 
application. Note however that non-MacRoman characters (so called 
Unicode characters) will be ignored in non Unicode apps. Perhaps it may 
not work well with Carbon Unicode apps like Word.


Kino