English
11 May 2009
I recently created a couple of keyboard layouts for Windows.
The first is the same as the normal United States keyboard, but with many special characters (including ‘real quotes’ instead of straight quotes—and a real dash instead of the two-hyphen substitute) available with the right Alt key. There are also dead keys, which allow one to type letters with compound diacritics, such as ḗ and ǚ.
The second is like the first, except that the curly quotes are placed on the keys ; and ‘. I then moved the semicolon and colon to < and > respectively, and straight quotes (if for some reason one wants them) to AltGr+’ and AltGr+”.
The third is a Cyrillic layout, arranged so as the keys phonetically correspond to the US layout. The layout is based on typing Esperanto in the Cyrillic alphabet.
I normally use the second. The first is suitable for those who want a familiar layout—one that won’t get in the way when they don’t want the extra characters. You can download all three for yourself here: the first, second and third.
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