I have an apple lap-top with an external keyboard. My computer has the capacity to compose in German (a capacity I need) but my keyboard is in English and many crucial keystrokes (extra characters, punctuation, etc.) are different on the German layout. Since I have to plug in my external keyboard any way, why could I not buy a German external keyboard to plug in when I have a lot of German stuff to type? Where could I buy such a keyboard?
German keyboards for recent model Mac lap-top
keyboard
Related Solutions
If you have a keyboard similar to the one described here, it sounds like you can just pop the keys off and push them back down in the new position.
Although it isn't exactly what you asked for, one possible solution is to use the built-in ability to rapidly switch Input Sources (aka keyboard layouts). To make this function useable, you'll need to do a little setup.
Open System Preferences: Keyboard and select the Keyboard Pane. Check the option to Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar (1), then click on the Input Sources… button (2).
The Language and Text preference pane will open to the Input Sources tab. Select the input sources (3) you want to access on a regular basis. Fewer is better, remember you can always return to this tab and change your selections. When you've made your choices click on the Keyboard Shortcuts… button (4).
The Keyboard preferences pane will open to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. Select Keyboard and Text Input from the column on the left (5). Then check the options to enable the keyboard shortcuts to navigate between input sources. (6).
If you stay with the default shortcuts, they will conflict with the default Spotlight shortcuts. Select Spotlight from the column on the left, and either deactivate or change the keyboard shortcut assigned to the Spotlight functions.
Now when you need to type a special character, use the hotkey to select the appropriate Input Source and use Lion's long hold function to bring up the choices for each character.
I am currently using Romanian as my Input Source . I know this because it's displayed in the Keyboard and Character Viewers menu item. A long press on a provides:
Once I've typed the Romanian character, I can use the keyboard shortcut to return to the U.S. input source.
Best Answer
You don't need a German keyboard to use the German keyboard layout. You can enable the German keyboard layout from System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources, and you can use the virtual keyboard viewer to look up the positions of characters.
Even if you buy a keyboard with a German keyboard layout, the input source won't change automatically when you connect the keyboard or press some keys on it.
You can buy keyboards for different keyboard layouts from store.apple.com.
Note that there are some differences between the Apple and standard PC versions of the German keyboard layout. Particularly the five ASCII special characters under option are all under different keys. You can download a keylayout file for the PC version from http://www.nullpointer.de/stuff/keylayout/.
ISO (European) keyboards have one more key than ANSI (U.S.) keyboards. The extra key is a dead key for
^in both the Apple and standard PC variants of the German keyboard layout. In the version of the German keyboard layout that is included in OS X, option-shift-6 enters the same dead key state as the extra key.