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awesome tool thanks! :]

Yes! Great idea! But I do agree with Henne. For me it would be too much of a change from my Danish keyboard.. Some of the letters are placed elsewhere – and må æ, ø and å is missing….

fun but no thanks ill stick to normal keyboard layout. Its what im used to. So no point of changing.

Uhh, spanish version would be great, is it easy to remap to another language? that’s really worth a try

Copy for the text: “n the picture above (see full image for Mac or full image for Windows) the diacritical keys are printed on a beige background, e.g. acute is on / and diaeresis is on”

What a cool resource!

I think this works best for an english keyboard. I´ll stick to the glyphs pallette as long as I use a Norwegian keybard.

How can you access the menu commands using the keyboard if you’ve overridden the ALT+character commands? Presumably if I type in ALT+F i’ll now get a £ sign rather than the file menu – surely this is a big loss in functionality?

Too bad this will only work for people using the a qwerty keyboard :(

Yeah would definitely like to see this for Linux as well.

However what James said (overriding shortcuts) would be an issue.
But it wouldn’t it be possible to use a key combination to turn those characters on.
For example like the (Thai-US) keyboard I’m using now, if I hit alt+shift it switches between Thai and Roman characters.

Great idea though.

Marc Pettifer, I am sorry :-) But Windows 7 is kinda not released yet… We cannot guarantee supporting it. Can you please be more specific in how it doesn’t work? Does it display any error message?

Wonderful, wonderful tool!

One request: ç

please!!!!!!!!!!!!!! спасибо!

Jodi, we’ll see how we can do it. By the way, how do they type it on a regular French keyboard?

Cool about the ALT+GR thang on Windows…
Add my vote for a UK Layout too!

> Mari, can you please tell what the differencies between Norwegian and English keyboards are?

The different Keyboard layouts are explained in wikipedia :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout

Main differences of UK I can think of (not having a US keyboard next to me…)

SHIFT+2 is ”
SHIFT+3 is £
SHIFT+4 is $
ALTGR+4 is €
@ is over on the right hand side where ” is on a US keyboard

Full layout differences between UK and US here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards

You say that this works with “standard English QWERTY layout” but there is no such thing. Do you mean en-US, en-GB or what?

Right-Alt is going to get in the way when I am trying to use a virtual machine…

Personally, I find this too restricting, which is why I prefer to copy-and-paste from the full Unicode repertoire, from

Dave, I guess I mean en-US :-)

I don’t see any advantage over using what I already have standard on my Mac. And some actually need more keystrokes. I can make an ï with alt-u i and alt-g already gives me ©. I suppose someone just starting out who has not yet learned the keystrokes for these and other glyphs may find the different mnemonics useful.

I can’t quite figure out how to install it – and I’ve rebooted. It says it was installed correctly but I can’t figure out what Control Panel you mean. Do you mean the Control Panel in the Windows Start Menu? Or the Control Panel in the application? I can’t seem to find the application anywhere.

Verry great idea.
Thanks for it.
I will have a look to ukulele for doing the same for Mac French “AZERTY” keyboard.

East-europeans would welcome other accents, like cedillas and commas for Romania (for ş and ţ), or a tool to edit the Windows layout (btw, Vista has a nasty, non-UTF Romanian keyboard implementation, instead of #351 puts a #53? for example)

I wish, there would be something like this in German :-(

AWESOME.

Seriously, as an Italian developer, I hate how the italian keyboard layout is so uncomfortable while developing (the curly braces require quite an acrobatic feat to be typed for instance), and swapping keyboard layout everytime I have to do a code block and back when an italian string needs to be written.

Just 2 more things:
1. Please give us a FULL layout complete with normal, shift, alt, alt gr, and alt gr+shift version
2. I would SO buy a keyboard with that layout, it would really help me with the transition, and it would raise you some cash.

Brendan, thanks for the link, it’s very funny :-)

by the way, its simple to make you own keyboard by «microsoft keyboard layout creator»

lilumi, exactly, that’s what I used for Windows. And there’s Ukelele for Mac. Both tools are free.

Joseph Cotten, it’s a nice idea :-)

I like it but it has removed my pound symbol (GBP Sterling symbol). I used to access it with Shift+3 but that now gives me a hash symbol. Which, incidentally, used to be Alt+3, but that now gives me: ³. What looks to me like a tiny, superscript numeral three.

This is on a MacBook Pro originally set to British layout with a wireless Apple keyboard, the one with an @ and a Euro symbol above the number 2. Oh, hang on, the Euro symbol has disappeared as well.

I know we’re in the midst of a recession but I don’t think we should ditch the Euro and the Pound altogether. Any idea how to get them back?

I feel like this isn’t really necessary on the Mac. I’m pretty OK with pressing option e to enter acute mode, and then pressing the vowel of my choice. Copyright symbol is option-G (which it kind of looks like), pi is option p…. It’s pretty intuitive already!

It didn’t work on my Windows XP machine, for some reason (then again, I don’t have an Alt Gr key). Guess I’ll stick with the ALT+0147 classics ALT+0148,

good stuff~

Well, that sounds nice for Windows, where you have to go through a lot of hoops to type special characters, but why would I want option-A to do something other than å or why would I want option-T to do ™ when option-2 does it now? Option-T does a dagger (†) which I need too.

The whole thing reads like they don’t realize every Mac already does this stuff. And in some cases it’s more complicated than it already is! Like to get é it says I have to do alt+shift+/ then e … to do that now, I do option-e, then e.

Ever since I read about Robert Bringhurst modifying his keyboard mapping I wanted to be able to do the same thing. Maybe this will be the answer.

How about an Italian Keyboard?

You guys always seize to amaze me, I love it, thanks for the heads up…

Terrance Charles

I did the same thing using Autohotkey

; Em Dash - Alt 0151
; Ctrl-win-Hyphen
^#-::SendPlay, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad5}{Numpad1}{ALTUP}
…and so on.

I use built-in dreamweaver shortcuts to give me fast special characters…

Great layout, but difficult for me to use as I’m in the UK. As a programmer I’ll probably never get used to ” not being shift 2!

Another vote for a UK layout please :)

sure, as always, no linux version….

дооооооо

it’s a good idea,but it is not very useful to me,i use chinese

@Ilya: Nidhi has already stated the solution above. One can enable the English-International layout under Windows to be able to use all sorts of special characters like diacritics and more by simply pressing certain punctuation keys before typing the desired characters.

For example, to write ä I would press shift + the key with quotes + a.

More info: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306560

Hope it helps.

(from the intro)

pay attention to diacritics (en-dash, em-dash, hyphen etc.)

Actually, those are just punctuation. Diacritics (Diacritics) are the accents, cedillas, etc. The main body of the article, of course, uses the term correctly.

Cool stuff!

I like the idea for PC but it seems a little counter-intuitive to me using a Macbook. I am already familiar with the locations of marks like `, ´, ¨, ˜,ˆ,ø,å,ß,ç, and the map actually changes the location of some of them. So it doesn’t really make sense from a Mac-user perspective.

All of the special characters are readily usable just by holding down Option+letter on a Mac; they don’t require a complicated numbercode as on a PC. For example to write é I just hold the Option (alt) key + e (which results in a blank ´) + e again (which changes the blank ´ to é, or if I had typed another vowel, would turn the ´ to á, í, ó, ú, whatever.) It is pretty simple to use already, although on the Canadian CSA and Canadian French-language keyboards for Mac, it simplifies it even further down to one keystroke, replacing the question mark: é! (The question mark goes up to the number keys, joining the exclamation point.)

My point is that on a Mac it only takes about 5 repetitions before you learn to use these marks and feels very intuitive. It was cool of you to make this idea inclusive of both operating systems though.

This layout is based on a huge assumption that the whole world speaks American English. My keyboard layout is Swedish because I live here, not because I’m Swedish, and I speak South African English because I was born there.

It needs some work for multilanguage input, but other than that it’s fantastic. Really good job. Any Swedish developers feel the urge to tackle this “problem”?

Hey,

I followed the installation instructions precisely, but besides CTRL, Option, Shift and Cmd no keys are working… even by clicking directly on keys in the keyboard viewer. Application restart has no effect.

Mac OS X 10.5.6
MacBook Pro
Tried with both internal keyboard and external DAS keyboard

Wonderful thing. The only thing missing here is elipsis sign (…) planted on some key.

thank you very much ……………it’s great effort

Aleksandar, it must be available on Alt+/. I don’t specify it on a picture, since I don’t recommend using it.

would it be possible to get a copy of the Illustrator file in a legacy CS or CS2 format?

I would love to see this for Linux.

Awesome and extremely useful. Thanks for all the amazing free stuff!!

Well…on a Mac, holding down the alt/option key and hitting nearly any key on the keyboard supplies you with a few of these characters already.

Now… the diacritics on the other hand could be quite useful.

What’s up all, I’m redone to the forum and just wanted to translate hey.