I had a very frustrating experience today at my new job here in Paris when my boss gave me the login credentials for some website and I couldn’t seem to make them work. I swear I was typing exactly what he told me to, yet I kept getting rejected, eventually he tries the same code, and it works perfectly.
So I was wondering, is there something different about AZERTY number keys that might allow someone to type two identical-looking number, say “5” but with different UNICODE values? If you look at these keyboards, you’ll see that the number keys do happen to correspond to very different symbols than QWERTY keyboards. So I was thinking perhaps if I obtained the “5” using 'shift+number 5" it might be creating a different value than if I used num-lock+5.
Perhaps I’m totally out to lunch and was just repeatedly hitting the wrong keys but I think I’ve come across this issue before so perhaps there is some simple explanation that would explain how I was seemingly typing the right password but it was not being accepted.
First thought: don’t just look at the what is printed on the keyboard. Also check what keyboard layout the operating system is set to. You could have, for example, a French keyboard but someone went into the regional settings and told the computer to use an American keyboard layout.
If you’re not sure, try typing in the password in a text editor window and then copying and pasting it.
Indeed. I can switch my keyboard from Azerty to Qwerty, but also to a Spanish or Russian layout.
And besides, for reasons unknown, my keyboard switches frequently all by itself from the French to the American layout. Which I’m going to notice immediately if I’m for instance posting here, but won’t if I’m trying to enter a password. So indeed make sure that the correct layout is currently selected.
(You can have a bar for selection at the top of your screen, which I find convenient. Otherwise, it’s a small icon at the bottom, with “FR” for a french layout and “EN” for the american one)
Dunnow. It’s a different issue I guess, but with some games in english for instance, there’s no way to use some prompts without setting the keyboard layout to QWERTY. The equivalent French key won’t work (nor will any other key while using an AZERTY layout). Some other prompts will work but only by using a completely unrelated key on the French keyboard. Or several keys will work with the AZERTY layout, but only one, as intented in the game, with QWERTY.
So, as a result, I’m not really certain that similar keys will result in the same UNICODE when using different layouts. But that’s just my uneducated experience, since I basically know nothing about UNICODE. Only that hitting what seems to be the appropriate key won’t necessarily have the expected result if I use a layout the game wasn’t intended for.
Not that I can think of. I spent quite some years typing passwords on AZERTY keyboards when I was living in France and I never heard of this issue.
When you click on this icon to switch the layout of your keyboard, that change is ‘application specific’. If suppose that your default if EN and you switch to FR while you are writing a word document, it will reset to EN as soon as you move to another window. And back to FR when you move back to word.
This used to drive me crazy as I correspond in English, French and German. Until I found the solution… blessed are the Swiss people !
This happens to me sometimes. My theory is that there is a key combination that can switch the keyboard layout, and sometimes I hit that key combination by mistake. I’ve never taken the trouble to determine what they key combination is.
After typing that last sentence, I decide to do a five-second Google search to figure out that key combination. It turns out that with Windows, pressing Alt+Shift changes the keyboard language.
