Adding Support for the Alt key in Keyboard Shortcuts.

[mdintzis]

I have some questions and observations about statements made in previous discussions about OOo Writer and lack of support for the Alt key in shortcut key combinations.

(1)
On the standard US keyboard, there is an Alt key on either side of the spacebar. What exactly is the "Alt Gr" key, which people keep mentioning? How is this key customizable, as some users have commented?

(2)
It occurs to me that using a separate keyboard customization software product, one could map specific keyboard shortcuts in Windows to specific keyboard strokes within OOo? One could proceed in the following way:

1. Add a custom menu to OOo writer. Create a macro that opens this menu. (Hitting the "Alt" key selects the "File" menu option. Hitting the "End" key moves the highlight to the custom menu. Hitting the down arrow key opens the menu.) Give the macro a shortcut key sequence that you don't expect to use anywhere else, like "Ctrl-Shift-Insert".

2. Turn the selection of specific paragraph or character styles into macros within OOo. (All the macros do is apply a style to the currently selected text. Nothing complicated about this.)

2. Add those macros to the custom menu.

3. Use the external mapping application to map keyboard combinations like Alt-L, Alt-B, etc. to key sequences that open the custom menu and move down to the nth item in the menu list.

The main idea behind this approach is that of safety for other applications. The macro involves only moving the cursor a certain number of spaces and hitting the "Enter" key at the end. Additionally, as long as you don't use the key sequence that opens the custom OOo menu in any another Windows application, you can't run into any trouble.

Does this idea make sense? Is there a smarter way to do this?

Does anybody know of a good software product (freeware, if possible) that allows this sort of thing?