France's 100 year-old AZERTY keyboard - the equivalent of the English-language QWERTY - is to be reconfigured after the government ruled that it encourages bad writing, reports BBC News.
The AZERTY set-up has infuriated generations of writers, because of labour-creating peculiarities like the need for two strokes to make full-stops and numerals.
But official ire is directed less at such inconveniences, and more at certain quirks and oversights which, it says, make it hard to construct proper French.
"Today it is practically impossible to write French correctly using a keyboard that has been bought in France," the ministry intones.
"More surprisingly, certain European countries like Germany and Spain respect French writing better than the French are able to - because their keyboards permit it!"
The culture ministry has commissioned Paris-based consultancy AFNOR to draw up a list of recommendations by the summer.
The aim is to produce a new standard keyboard that will gradually replace the many varieties of AZERTY currently on the market.
AZERTY was introduced as a French adaptation of the original QWERTY keyboard on US typewriters at the start of the 20th Century.
The main problem identified by the culture ministry is the difficulty for French writers to use "certain accented characters - and especially in upper-case".
Some common lower-case accented letters - like é (e-acute) and è (e-grave) - have dedicated keys on AZERTY.
The letter ù (u-grave) also has its own key, even though it is used in only one word in the entire French language - où, meaning where.
But other accented letters are harder to compose. And accented capital letters require manoeuvres of which, according to the ministry, most people are unaware.
This ignorance, and the consequent growing disuse of accented capitals, has given rise to the widespread belief that good French does not need them. Most people think that ignoring an accent on a capital letter is acceptable.
Not so! says the culture ministry, pointing out that both the Academie Francaise and the National Print have issued guidelines urging the use of accents on capitals.
A similar absence is that of a Ç - a capital C-cedilla, with the curly bit beneath signifying that it is pronounced like an 's'. Again the ministry says people think it is not necessary, but it is.
Likewise the two "ligatures" - æ and œ - the latter particularly common in words like œil (eye) and œuf (egg). Neither is accessible on the keyboard.
The ministry also laments the absence of what it says are the correct signs for introducing direct speech in French - the double chevrons « and », as opposed to the inverted commas used in English.
And it wants to make it easier to write in regional French languages, like Occitan, Catalan, Breton and Polynesian.
So symbols like the tilde (the squiggle on a ñ), the interpunct (mid-line dot, used in Catalan), and the macron (bar above a vowel - ā -indicating length) all need to be readily available.