 What’s
the use of this keyboard?
From one
single keyboard layout I can produce
all the following characters
and symbols without having to change font.
–– HOVER OVER ANY COLOURED CHARACTER TO DISCOVER ITS OPERATIVE DEAD KEY COMBINATION ––
Hover the cursor over any of the orange-coloured characters to find out which key combination produces it.
Click here to
see directly which key combination produces the diacritic grapheme you
need.
With this keyboard layout I can produce the correct graphemes for any European language whose script is based on roman letters. These languages include Catalan,
Czech (á č ď é ě í ň ó ř š ť ú ů ý ž), Danish (å æ ø), Dutch, English,
Estonian (ä ö ü õ),
Finnish (ä ö),
French (à â ç é è ê ë î ô ù û), Gaelic (Scottish or Irish), German (ä ö ü ß), Hungarian (ö ő ű), Icelandic (ð ø þ), Italian (à è é ì ò ù), Latvian (č ē ģ ī ķ ļ ņ š ū ž), Lithuanian (ą č ę ė į š ų ū ž), Norwegian (å æ ø), Polish (ą ć ę ł ń ś ź ż), Portuguese (ã â ç ê õ),
Romanian (ă ş ţ), Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish (á é í ñ ó ú), Swedish (å ä ö), Turkish (ç ğ İ ı ş) and Welsh (ŵ ŷ). Please note that digraphs (e.g. Slovenian dž and nj) have each to be
typed as separate letters. However,
the layout
described here does include ♭ ♯.
This
is all useful if you need to mention
Antonín Dvořák,
an E♭ alto sax, Bohuslav Martinů, or to quote Slavoj Žižek’s
ruminations on Rasa Kaušiūtė’s performance of a Eurovision
song in
Łódź. It’s also useful if you want to settle your account with Dŵr
Cymru, or write about something in F♯ minor, or if you want to
distinguish between a rising fourth (e.g. f♯↗b) and a falling fifth
(f♯↘b), or avoid calling Herr Åström Astrom, or writing lecon instead of leçon.
The keyboard layout presented here lets you type the right
characters for all European languages based on the Latin alphabet and
to enter a few musical (♭ ♯ ), mathematical (+ - × ÷ < > = ± ≈
¬) and
financial characters ($ € £ ¥ ¢). It also lets you author
correctly edited books (see here)
that use proper quotes (‘ ’ or “ ” or « » instead of " " or ' '), Em
and En dashes (—, –), bullets (•), elipses (…), section signs (§) and
suchlike. This keyboard layout can also be used to full advantage with the font taggdings.ttf which gives you keyboard access to another 200 symbols and characters.
Although
I've personalised an Alt Gr key for my own use when editing text,
all characters shown in the AltGr
layout near
the end of this page can be
generated using the keyboard's six dead keys
(explanation soon).
In fact, those dead keys help produce many times more
characters
than AltGr can on its own. Besides, AltGr keystrokes can cause
all sorts of unforeseen problems when using
popular software like Adobe Photoshop. In
short, I’ve found it best to keep character expansion and
repertoire to
dead key combinations.
Dead
keys
Six
dead
keys
(highlighted below and explained
after the keyboard map) are used in Tagg’s 2010
Multilingual keyboard. They are: ´
(acute
accent),
` (grave accent), ^
(circumflex accent),
¨ (Umlaut
or
diaeresis), º
(degree sign/ring),
and ~ (tilde). These dead keys are
located as follows
on a US laptop computer keyboard. The
characters added in rectangles exemplify what can be generated using which dead keys.
When a
dead key is pressed your computer waits for input from a
second keystroke. For example, pressing the tilde key (~) produces
nothing on its own,
but ~ will generate ã
if the next key you press is a,
ñ
if ~
is followed by n,
ç
if followed by c
and so on, as long as the
second keystroke is set up to be combined with the ~ (see overview
of tilde dead key combinations).
Please note that:
[1] A dead key followed by space produces the dead key
character on its own.
[2] A dead key followed by a key not designated for
combination produces the dead key followed by that
second character. For example, ^z
results in ž and the combination ^e
in ê
but ^ j just produces ^j.
Re-assignment of
keys
~
(tilde), `
(grave) and ^
(circumflex) all have designated positions on UK and US computer keyboards but
the
three other dead keys —´
(acute), ¨
(Umlaut) and °
(degrees sign) — do not. This means that the 3½ characters
(+ = ¬ ¦) ousted by the three dead keys ¨ ´ ° ` must
be produced
differently.
 |
° ` dead |
 |
^ dead
6 normal |
 |
¨ ´ dead
|
 |
~ dead
# normal |
To produce |
type this |
To produce |
type this |
+ |
++ (¨¨) |
= |
== (´´) |
¬ |
´ (=) then ° (|) |
¦ |
´ (=) then ` |
` |
` then space |
~ |
~ then space |
´ |
´ (=) then space |
¨ |
¨ (+) then space |
° |
° (|) then space |
^ |
^ then space |
Dead
key
combinations
 1.
´ (acute accent) is assigned to the equals key (=).
Apart from
generating Á á Ć ć É é Í í Ń ń Ó ó Ŕ ŕ Ś
ś Ú ú Ẃ ẃ Ý ý
Ź ź etc., acute accent combinations produce many other symbols and
characters.
2.
` — grave
accent is located in its usual
position. Apart from generating À à È è Ì ì Ò ò Ù ù Ẁ ẁ Ỳ ỳ and so on, the
grave accent combines to produce slashed letters (e.g. Ðð Łł
Øø Þþ).
- Grave + numbers 1- 5 generates £ ¤ £ € ¢ ¥.
- Grave + 7 8 9 0 - generates → ↑ ↓ ↘ ↗
3.
^ —
circumflex accent
or caret, as usual at Shift-6, aside from generating  â Ê ê Î î Ô ô Û û Ŵ ŵ Ŷ ŷ and so on,
is also used for hačeks or carons (Č č Ď ď Ň ň Ř ř Š š Ť ť Ž ž) and for the ligatures
Æ æ (^ + Q/q) and Œ/œ (^ + P/p).
4.
¨ — umlaut
or diaeresis, situated as Shift on the += key,
does Ä ä
Ë ë
Ï ï Ö ö Ü ü Ẅ ẅ and Ÿ ÿ. ¨
(Umlaut) followed by s (lower-case S) produces ß. ¨J and ¨j produces
Turkish İ
and ı.
5.
~ – tilde is
in its
correct keyboard position and
produces characters featuring a tilde (Ã ã Ñ ñ Õ õ), or a cedilla/ogonek (Ą ą
Ç ç Ę ę Ģ ģ Ķ ķ Ļ ļ Ņ ņ Ş ş Ţ ţ Ų ų), or Hungarian long vowels (Ő ő Ű ű).
6.
° — the degree sign is in the position of ¬ and is used to produce any
character featuring a ring (Å å Ů ů © ®) or a breve (short sign: Ă ă
Ĕ ĕ Ğ ğ, Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ) or a dot (Ŀ ŀ Ż ż).
|
Dead key combination
anomalies
The
more dead keys, the more
characters can be produced, but that means more characters have
to
be reassigned from their
normal position on the keyboard. It would have been ideal to have
separate
dead keys
for cedilla (ç etc.), ogonek (ę etc.), breve (ă etc.), double acute (ő
etc.), caron (č etc.), dot (ż etc.), slash (ø etc.) and ligature (æ
etc.), as well as for ´ `^¨~ and ° but that could not be done without
radically altering the traditional keyboard layout. Avoiding that
problem in turn necessitated the combination of several diacritical
signs under one set of dead key
combinations, for example circumflex, hačeks and ligatures all under ^.
To minimise user confusion I’ve tried to ensure some logic in
these hybrid dead key combinations. Unfortunately, trying to fit
several diacritical glyphs into one dead key combination set resulted
in some anomalies, especially for glyphs combining with A or O. If
there was no room left on the vowel in question for a particular glyph
it was assigned to a neighbouring free consonant key, usually
from A to Q, from E to F, and
from
O to P. Here’s a list of
those
anomalies.
Character = keystroke |
Why? |
Character = keystroke |
Why? |
Ă
is °Q |
°A is already Å |
Ņ is ~M |
~N is already Ñ |
Ą is ~Q |
~A is already à |
Ő is ~P |
~O is already Õ |
Æ is ^Q |
^A is
already  |
Ø is `P |
`O is
already Ò |
Ā is `Q |
`A is already À |
Πis ^P |
^O is already Ô |
Ě is ^F |
^E is already Ê |
Ū is `K |
`U is already Ù, `J is İ |
Ē is `F |
`E is already È |
Ų is ~J |
~U is already Ű, ~K is Ķ |
İ/ı is ¨J/¨j |
¨I is already Ï |
|
|
Alt
Gr map
The
Alt-Gr key, just to the right of the spacebar, is not a dead key:
you have to press another key at the same time (not after, as with dead
keys) in order to produce anything. Computers usually assign Alt-Gr
combinations numerical values that are identical to those
produced by pressing Alt-Cntrl in combination with a third key. Such
key combinations are often used as keyboard shortcuts to perform
specific operations (e.g. Alt-Cntrl-Del), especially in applications,
for example Alt-F in Word or Photoshop to bring up the File menu, in
other software to do a Find (search). Some such combinations even close
down the software without saving your work or delete chunks what you
just did. It is for these reasons that I've largely abandoned Alt-Gr as
a means of generating characters. Of course you can change keyboards
when using Word, Photosop and so on, but I think that defeats the point
of using one single layout for virtually everything you do at the
computer. The only Alt-Gr combinations used in the keyboard layout
explained are listed here (and I'll probably get rid of most of
these in due course):
¡ ¥ £ ¢ € ↑ ¶ ⇄ × – + ¹ ² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ § † « » — ×
~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ + ` 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
+ “ ” … ≈ Ñ Ç É ¿ + ‘ ’ • ñ ç é à
P { } : " N < > ? p [ ] ; n , . /
All these and all other characters are produced through dead-key combinations (especially those using the acute accent).
Software essentials
(KbdEdit) and download
There´s no point in downloading the keyboard: [a] if you don´t really need it; [b] if you don´t want to spend €8 on the cheapest variant of the software essential to installation of this keyboard configuration.
The
keyboard layout
presented above was created using a reliable, professional,
user-friendly, bug-free and reasonably
priced UNICODE-based piece of software called KbdEdit,
written and distributed by Ivica Nicolic in Dublin (visit www.kbdedit.com for more info). To create all the dead key combinations I needed the
full
version (20€) of KbdEdit but there’s a Lite version for €12 and a
Player
only version for €8. Anyone else linguistically eclectic or plain mad
enough to
want to use the keyboard layout presented on this page will need to
download at least the Player version of KbdEdit (€8).
I've uploaded this 2010 layout to a *.kbe file (3k) on
this site but it will be of no use to you if you can’t open
it using the KbdEdit software. I strongly recommend KbdEdit to anyone needing to produce characters
other than ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789 etc. Iva Nicolic has
much better and more radical solutions than mine,
providing Full version buyers with such goodies as a Trilingual
Serbian Cyrillic / Latin / Greek keyboard, a Multi-Lingual
Hindi-US English keyboard, tips about how to
disable the Windows key during gaming, how to map
function keys to produce, say, Greek or Cyrillic keys, and a whole host
of other useful tools.
DOWNLOAD THE KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE
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