Hi,
I would like to propose a new keyboard layout option for the Framework Laptop 13: the Canadian French ACNOR (CFA) layout.
The Canadian French ACNOR layout is based on the CAN/CSA Z243.200-92 standard, which defines Canada’s standardized keyboard layout. It is also the basis of the default French Canadian keyboard layout used by Apple. The Government of Quebec has used this standardized layout, including characters from the secondary group shown in blue, since the early 1990s.
The layout is known as Canadian Multilingual Standard (CMS) on Windows and as Canadian (CSA) or ca(multix) on Linux.
The standard defines three main levels of compliance:
- Level A covers the primary group of characters, shown on the left side of the key legends in the illustration below.
- Level B adds secondary group 2a, which, together with the primary group, covers the complete ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set.
- Level C extends support to the ISO 6937 character set (group 1/2a/2b).
At least Level B compliance with the CAN/CSA Z243.200-92 standard has also been implemented on selected products from manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo, Model F Labs, Solidus, Unicomp, and Intekview, which shows that this is not merely a theoretical or software-only layout, but one that has already been implemented in commercial hardware.
For additional details, I recommend consulting the Wikipedia page on the CAN/CSA Z243.200 keyboard standard, which provides a fairly detailed explanation of the layout and its compliance levels.
For the Framework Laptop 13, I would propose a Level B + Œ + € + ˇ implementation (Latin-1 and the additional Latin-9 characters œŒ€ŸšŠžŽ). In this configuration, the generic currency sign (¤) is moved to the secondary group on the third level, which is the only character assigned to that position.
On Linux, the Canadian (CSA) layout supports this proposed configuration completely as of xkeyboard-config 2.48. The ca(multix) definition from that version can therefore be used as a reference for the exact Unicode code points (U+XXXX) assigned to each position.
For the physical key legends, ISO 9995-7 pictograms should be used instead of French or English text labels wherever standardized pictograms exist.
There is also an important requirement concerning the presentation of the legends. On keys E00–E12, D11, C10, and B08–B09, the characters should be arranged as a 3 × 2 matrix — two columns and three rows. This is particularly important if the keyboard legends are monochrome, because the spatial arrangement distinguishes the primary and secondary groups clearly. The secondary group is based on ISO 9995-3.
Thank you for considering this keyboard layout option for the Framework Laptop 13.
↑ The proposal for the keyboard layout Canadian French ACNOR (CFA).
↑ ISO 9995-3:2010 : Outdated Common Secondary Group
The space / non-breaking space pictogram on the spacebar is also important to print, if possible.
The ISO 9995-7 pictograms and their corresponding Unicode code points (U+XXXX) are listed in the ISO 9995-7 section of the Wikipedia page.
