Typography Keyboard Layout: Download Now!
In January we commissioned Ilya Birman, a Russian designer with passion for typography, to adapt his typography keyboard layout (which has become a common typographer’s tool in Russia) to create a version for English-speaking designers, artists and, of course, typographers across the globe.
The main idea was to provide the web design community with a handy tool that would let designers enter characters that are usually unavailable on a keyboard easier and quicker. If you already tried to enter such words like naïve or résumé or used special symbols (trademark symbol ™) or pay attention to punctuation (en-dash, em-dash, hyphen etc.) and diacritics (accents, cedillas, etc.), you probably know what we mean.
We asked our Twitter followers to participate in our beta-testing. And after we received a lot of positive feedback, we implemented some of your suggestions in the final version.
In this post we release the Typography Keyboard Layout – a simple, yet useful tool that lets you enter characters that are usually unavailable on a keyboard with ease. Hopefully it will help you to achieve better typography in your designs.
Typography Keyboard Layout (Win / Mac)
Good designers, undoubtedly, know that quotation marks look like “this” and not like "this." The latter are typewriter legacy and today are to be used solely in programming. Good designers also know, that dash is not the same as hyphen.
The most common use for hyphens in English is (surprisingly enough) hyphenation; dashes are used in ranges (2006–2009) or — and this is an example — as an alternative to parentheses. Good designers never use letter ‘x’ instead of multiplication sign in 1920×1440, and they never put (c) instead of © under their work. Oh, and they also do good designs.
So, now life is going to be a little bit easier. No more will you need to open Character Palette or try to recover that Alt+0163 combination from your memory.
Meet Typography Layout for Mac and Windows
This thing is a regular keyboard layout, except that with Alt key on Mac or Alt Gr key on Windows it lets you type all these nice characters seamlessly.
Just type Alt+T, and you get a ™. Everyday things are apostrophe (Alt + '), quotes (Alt + < >), em-dash (Alt + -) and en-dash (Alt + Shift + -). Other stuff is intended to be not so hard to remember if you use it. For example, Alt+v is for ↓ , since the letter ‘v’ looks somewhat like arrow pointing down. Alt+A is ≈ for approximately, Alt+S is § for section. Guess why Alt+8 is ∞ and Alt+R is ®. So, you get the idea.
The layout also supports many kinds of diacritics, so you can type words like naïve or café and have fun. On 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 : .
To type character é, you first press Alt + Shift + / (this kind of means “enter acute mode”), then press e. To type ï, press Alt + Shift + : , then press i. Not every character has a version with every possible accent. For example, there is no letter v with circumflex. In case you want to use such a character, you need to use combining diacritics. Press v and then Alt + Shift + ^ twice. You can hold Alt + Shift and double press ^ .
The best way to understand how it works is to play with it. But please note that many applications do not support combining diacritics, so whether you can use them or not is more or less question of your luck :-)
Get it for free!
Download and see install instructions.
- Download the Mac-layout
- Download the Windows-layout
- Install instructions
(to switch from installation guide for Win to installation guide for Mac and vice versa, click on the Apple- or Windows-logo under the keyboard image – see below)
. - Image source files of the layout
Adobe Illustrator and PNG-pictures with transparent background, so you can put it onto your favourite wallpaper (both with Win and Mac layouts). - .pdf-poster for the Mac-layout and .pdf-poster for the Win-layout
- full layout image for Mac and full layout image for Windows
Bugs, ideas or suggestions?
Please report bugs and fixes directly to Ilya Birman and please leave your comments, ideas and suggestions for further improvements in the comments to this post.
Dönitz
April 2nd, 2009 2:56 amNice article and nice tool!
Marc Pettifer
April 2nd, 2009 2:59 amHmm, not working for me on w7 :’(
wesruv
November 2nd, 2009 12:16 pmWorks great for me (W7 Enterprise).
Wishing there was a bullet in this layout, none the less anything that keeps me out of charmap.exe is a _godsend_
chris
April 2nd, 2009 2:59 amawesome tool thanks! :]
Henne
April 2nd, 2009 3:06 amWow, neat Idea indeed. But it’s not working for me on a MacBook. After dropping the files in Libary/Keyboard Layouts, “Typography Layout” is possible to activate.
But then I am not able to write anything. Even the special characters like (c) is not possible to type. It’s like I am not hitting the keyboard… nothing happens for me.
But despite, it is definetly a useful and handy tool! Would be even more useful in different Language-Layouts. For example “” is next to “y” in Germany, and “y” is where the american “z” is. You may considerate it for the next Version ;)
Cecelia
April 2nd, 2009 3:15 amYes! 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….
Rafie
April 2nd, 2009 3:17 amI’m loving it!
V1
April 2nd, 2009 3:19 amfun but no thanks ill stick to normal keyboard layout. Its what im used to. So no point of changing.
Smashing Editorial
April 2nd, 2009 3:21 am@Ilya Birman: maybe we could release the source file of the layout, so other developers can modify it for their needs (German/Danish/… developers)?
Uhhh
April 2nd, 2009 3:22 amUhh, spanish version would be great, is it easy to remap to another language? that’s really worth a try
Steven
April 2nd, 2009 3:22 amThe image links for Mac & Win result error messages. Please fix it
The images are fixed now. Thanks and sorry for inconvenience!
Steven
April 2nd, 2009 3:23 amCopy 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”
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 3:24 amHenne, have you tried restarting the app in which you cannot type? Because on a Mac, the Layout starts working in each app after it’s restarted. Let us know if it still doesn’t work, and in this case please provide more info about your OS version and stuff.
Craig
April 2nd, 2009 3:24 amWhat a cool resource!
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 3:26 amMac Users can modify the Layout for their needs with a free tool Ukelele (Google it).
Mari
April 2nd, 2009 3:27 amI think this works best for an english keyboard. I´ll stick to the glyphs pallette as long as I use a Norwegian keybard.
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 3:32 amMari, can you please tell what the differencies between Norwegian and English keyboards are? You are not the only one, so may be later we will consider making special versions for other European languages, and your help may be valuable. Thanks!
James
April 2nd, 2009 3:35 amHow 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?
Micha
April 2nd, 2009 3:35 amShould implement this on Linux as well. Wasn’t aware of the fact but I missed something like this — exactly!
Steve
April 2nd, 2009 3:41 amToo bad this will only work for people using the a qwerty keyboard :(
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 3:42 amJames, on Windows, we use only the right Alt key (the Alt Gr) for the special characters, so you can still use the left one to access menu items. On a Mac, there are no menu accelerators, so both Alt keys are used for special characters.
Joost
April 2nd, 2009 3:44 amYeah 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.
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 3:47 amJoost, sure, you can enable this layout alongside your favourite other layout and switch back and forth, both on Windows anc Mac.
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 3:51 amMarc 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?
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 3:56 amEveryone, please notice, that this software uses the standard English QWERTY layout as a base, so if your language uses different keyboard, you won’t feel quite confortable with it. But still, we welcome your feedback, both positive and negative: it will help us do better in possible future versions. Thanks!
Jodi
April 2nd, 2009 4:00 amWonderful, wonderful tool!
One request: ç
please!!!!!!!!!!!!!! спасибо!
Amarjeet Singh Rai
April 2nd, 2009 4:07 amGreat, but how about one for the UK keyboard?
Keys are changed, like the @ symbol.
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 4:10 amJodi, we’ll see how we can do it. By the way, how do they type it on a regular French keyboard?
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 4:11 amAmarjeet Singh Rai, how do you type @ on UK keyboard? And what’s on Shift+2 there? Thanks.
James
April 2nd, 2009 4:12 amCool about the ALT+GR thang on Windows…
Add my vote for a UK Layout too!
Pieter
April 2nd, 2009 4:12 amGreat idea. Most characters are already available on my Belgian Mac keyboard. Would be nice to have a Belgian version though.
… and one for Linux to use at work.
Tom Bille
April 2nd, 2009 4:12 am> 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
Aditya
April 2nd, 2009 4:14 amThis can be directly accomplished by Windows XP, although it makes it slightly difficult in using quotes and double quotes. I might give this a spin, but considering XP has an easier option built in, I am a bit skeptical about this.
James
April 2nd, 2009 4:16 amMain 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
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 4:17 amAditya, what do you mean by “directly accomplished”? Alt+XXXX, or Charmap, or am I missing something?
James
April 2nd, 2009 4:18 amFull layout differences between UK and US here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_and_American_keyboards
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 4:20 amJames, we’ll see what we can do. There must be a better solution than reinventing the layout for every single european language ;-) Let us first have more feedback, and thanks for the info.
Dave
April 2nd, 2009 4:23 amYou 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
PomCompot
April 2nd, 2009 4:36 amGreat idea but don’t need it on Ubuntu : keyboard layouts are already really powerful.Just look at this french keyboard default layout. So useful. I can type things like : « 16 ÷ 4 ≤ 4, Ça c’est vrai ! » ou encore Œil de bœuf.
Here a screenshot of the layout : http://blog.rom1v.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/french-alternative-layout.png
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 4:37 amDave, I guess I mean en-US :-)
W3Planting
April 2nd, 2009 4:37 amone of the great tool, but its causing some issues for me. wired.
Kenneth
April 2nd, 2009 4:50 amI 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 iandalt-galready 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.Stefan Reichert
April 2nd, 2009 4:56 amI want a german version on drweb.de :)
Lara
April 2nd, 2009 5:03 amI 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.
zarathustra
April 2nd, 2009 5:11 amI type in Spanish frequently. I use autohotkey and then simply use a mapping that lets me hit one key 3 times to get the accented version. Coupled with the other incredible things Autohotkey can do of course! Here’s my standard mappings:
:c?*:nnn::ñ
:c?*:NNN::Ñ
:c?*:eee::é
:c?*:EEE::É
:c?*:iii::í
:c?*:III::Í
:c?*:ooo::ó
:c?*:OOO::Ó
:c?*:aaa::
:c?*:AAA::Á
:c?*:uuu::ú
:c?*:UUU::Ú
etc etc. I really don’t see hów ít cán gét ány éásíér thán thát!¡
Didier Durandet
April 2nd, 2009 5:12 amVerry great idea.
Thanks for it.
I will have a look to ukulele for doing the same for Mac French “AZERTY” keyboard.
Didier Durandet
April 2nd, 2009 5:13 am(bis)
Marius Stuparu
April 2nd, 2009 5:16 amEast-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)
Henne
April 2nd, 2009 5:18 amWooops, thanks Ilya Birman.
A restart does the magic!
Here’s a shot of my german qwertz-keyboard-layout: http://is.gd/qhww
Chris
April 2nd, 2009 5:20 amI wish, there would be something like this in German :-(
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 5:35 amLara, there’s no application at all, it’s just a keyboard layout, so yes, I mean the Windows Control Panel from the Start menu ;-)
Madness
April 2nd, 2009 6:25 amAWESOME.
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
April 2nd, 2009 6:35 amI just wanted to add an unmitigated “Thank you!” to this discussion, which is beginning to remind me of Louis CK’s interview with Conan O’Brien. Interview
This is fantastic and tremendously helpful.
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 6:41 amBrendan, thanks for the link, it’s very funny :-)
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 6:42 amOops, somehow there’s no Brendan’s comment anymore… :-/
lilumi
April 2nd, 2009 6:45 amby the way, its simple to make you own keyboard by «microsoft keyboard layout creator»
Joseph Cotten
April 2nd, 2009 6:52 amAn idea: Dashboard Widget. That is, make a Dashboard widget that has a small version of the layout graphic, and maybe even enable it to act like a Character map.
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 6:59 amlilumi, 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 :-)
Jodi
April 2nd, 2009 6:59 amIlya I have a US-en keyboard, but I do 50% of my typing in Catalan, which uses the ç. I am usually inserting it with the character map!
Ben Haldenby
April 2nd, 2009 7:05 amI 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?
snnaqvi
April 2nd, 2009 7:07 amVery useful
Ben
April 2nd, 2009 7:18 amI 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!
mikemike
April 2nd, 2009 7:26 amI love when frustrated little blog people say things like “Good _____ never do this. They always do this!” If you’re frustrated with life, consider sepuku.
Dan
April 2nd, 2009 7:28 amIt 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,
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 7:33 amBen, you are basically right. Historically the Windows version was first, and the Mac version just had to be identical so that switchers are happy.
Dan, if you don’t have Alt Gr key, you can try Ctrl+Alt+(char) instead, however this is not as convenient.
andol
April 2nd, 2009 8:32 amgood stuff~
FireExt
April 2nd, 2009 8:33 amHmm, good idea for a Firefox extension…
kostia
April 2nd, 2009 8:48 amWell, 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.
Ilya Birman
April 2nd, 2009 8:53 amkostia, please see my comment #64. Also, Mac default special character layout seems really weird to me.
Elliot
April 2nd, 2009 9:06 amEver 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.
AYANO
April 2nd, 2009 9:51 amWow. Supercool tool!
AnDi
April 2nd, 2009 10:06 amHow about an Italian Keyboard?
Jenny
April 2nd, 2009 10:23 amthis is great, thanks for sharing!!!
Terrance Charles
April 2nd, 2009 10:54 amYou guys always seize to amaze me, I love it, thanks for the heads up…
Terrance Charles
Ash
April 2nd, 2009 12:31 pmUseless for any non american/english user… But nice idea anyway.
Mo
April 2nd, 2009 12:40 pmI did the same thing using Autohotkey
; Em Dash - Alt 0151
; Ctrl-win-Hyphen
^#-::SendPlay, {ALTDOWN}{Numpad0}{Numpad1}{Numpad5}{Numpad1}{ALTUP}
…and so on.
Scott
April 2nd, 2009 12:44 pmFor the people asking about Linux – you should already have a similar system. You can use AltGr plus a punctuation key, plus a letter for various accents. For example, AltGr + ; + e = é. Search AltGr on Wikipedia for more info.
Jorre
April 2nd, 2009 1:42 pmI use built-in dreamweaver shortcuts to give me fast special characters…
Kaloyan
April 2nd, 2009 2:08 pmThanks! I do find it quite useful. I don’t get why people are complaining so much as they seem to have figured all out.
And a quick question – everything is working fine, except for the „ character (AltGr+j on this layout), which I tend to use a lot. Is the problem with me or is it something else?
David
April 2nd, 2009 2:36 pmGreat 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 :)
Nidhi
April 2nd, 2009 8:33 pmsome common accents can be used simply by changing ur windows language to english international… which is normally set to english us or uk…
then u can type é by simply using (apostrophe + e) and if u want simply apostrophe u enter space bar after apostrophe…
JODI ç can also be easily achieved by pressing shift+6+c..
Henk de Vries
April 3rd, 2009 12:30 amsure, as always, no linux version….
Thomas Off
April 3rd, 2009 3:34 amNice idea, but my Matias keyboard (http://matias.ca/usb2keyboard/) has this already in hardware.
flovergirll
April 3rd, 2009 5:28 amдооооооо
Randy
April 3rd, 2009 6:35 amHey, what does
3. In the layout list, replace the layout for the English language with the new one.
mean?
I have 10 different “english” settings, some clarity would be nice.
juneshow
April 3rd, 2009 7:10 amit’s a good idea,but it is not very useful to me,i use chinese
Yanith
April 3rd, 2009 8:20 amWOW! Awesome!! now i just need to mix the ENG keyboard to get all the Spanish ñ Ñ á é í ó ú ect Characters and i will be set…
now u gave me a project…. )) i’ll keep in touch if someone has it pls pass it along..
thanks y a n i t h o _a t_ h o t ma i l _d o t_ c o m
Aditya
April 3rd, 2009 8:36 am@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.
Aditya
April 3rd, 2009 8:38 amSorry I meant, US-International layout!
Kyle
April 3rd, 2009 10:06 am(from the intro)
Actually, those are just punctuation. Diacritics (Diacritics) are the accents, cedillas, etc. The main body of the article, of course, uses the term correctly.
Alexander
April 3rd, 2009 12:04 pmI can see this being useful for Windows. Alt codes are not at all intuitive, so you basically have to memorize them or have a cheat sheet handy.
For Mac, though, it seems pointless. I get @Ilya’s point about consistency (in response to @Ben), I guess, but I still wouldn’t use the Mac version. Reinventing the wheel for the sake of uniformity, while trading a relatively intuitive set of shortcuts like those on the Mac for something that requires a cheat sheet or memorization seems like a waste to me.
Ken Brucker
April 3rd, 2009 12:31 pmCool stuff!
Ken
April 3rd, 2009 12:43 pmI’m seeing a couple bugs in the layout on Mac. I’m using a US keyboard and layout normally.
1) With this layout active, my tab key stops working
2) My `~ key next the “1″ changes to /|
Given me some food for thought! Looks easy to modify once the syntax is understood.
Al
April 3rd, 2009 12:48 pmI 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.
M.Fireball
April 4th, 2009 5:02 amThis is wonderful, but what should be the shortcut for an en dash
Shift+Alt+Hyphenis just giving me a hyphen. Any ideas as to what might be wrong?Darryl
April 5th, 2009 6:16 amThis 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”?
Andre
April 6th, 2009 5:33 amThe Germans should also check the Neo-Layout, which offers even more, It can be found at http://neo-layout.org
Jack
April 6th, 2009 3:35 pmHey,
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
Ilya Birman
April 7th, 2009 10:52 amM.Fireball, are you using Windows or Mac? Thanks.
Aleksandar
April 7th, 2009 2:51 pmWonderful thing. The only thing missing here is elipsis sign (…) planted on some key.
Joe Clark
April 8th, 2009 9:30 amThis isn’t remotely needed for Macintosh users, save for characters like fractions. You’ve just moved the “special” characters from their natural places, which vary from one national keyboard layout to the next, to other places. This is not progress, but it may seem neato to Windoids, now entering their third decade of being unable to type an open single quotation mark in under 40 keystrokes.