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Keyboard Layout Creator

  Tags: Keyboard
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
Johntm
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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616 posts - 725 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 1 of 4
01 March 2010 at 5:52am | IP Logged 
I was surfing the Internet and found out that Microsoft has a keyboard layout creator. It lets you map out almost every key, and you can set it to where holding alt. changes the character, etc. I haven't played with it much, but it seems cool. I thought I'd share it with some of you linguaphiles who need custom layouts for you keyboard or who want to change the layout of a foreign keyboard or whatever.

Link
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Sprachprofi
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Germany
learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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2608 posts - 4866 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese

 
 Message 2 of 4
01 March 2010 at 10:21am | IP Logged 
I used this to create a variety of keyboards for myself. First of all to enter all the
accented characters that I have to deal with and that are not included in the German
keyboard by default - French cedilla, Esperanto chapelliteroj, Maori macrons, Pinyin tone
marks - and also keyboards for entering Greek and Arabic painlessly.

It is very good, especially considering that there is a heavily-marketed commercial
alternative out there, Tavultesoft Keyman, and that one is expensive as hell and doesn't
work with all programs, while this is free and works with everything.

Edited by Sprachprofi on 01 March 2010 at 10:22am

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Levi
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United States
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Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish
Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian

 
 Message 3 of 4
01 March 2010 at 6:02pm | IP Logged 
I've used this tool extensively, and developed a custom keyboard layout for my computer. This was necessary because I prefer to use the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout as opposed to the traditional QWERTY layout, and I also need a lot of accented letters and other typographical symbols that aren't typically found on American keyboard layouts. The result is a layout where I can type easily in just about any European language plus Pinyin. I can even switch to a custom Cyrillic or IPA layout that is also based on Dvorak.

I highly recommend using the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator if you want to be able to type in multiple languages without switching back and forth on the language tab, or if you just don't like any of the available layouts for your target language (some languages have very poorly designed layouts).

There is also a utility called "remapkey" (included in this download) that allows you to change around the positions of keys MKLC can't access. I used it to switch backspace and caps lock, since I use the former much much more than the latter.

If you want to check out a robust set of (free) multilingual keyboards in both QWERTY and Dvorak layouts, check out these, which were the inspiration for my own custom layouts.

Edited by Levi on 01 March 2010 at 6:14pm

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Johntm
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5424 days ago

616 posts - 725 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 4 of 4
01 March 2010 at 11:17pm | IP Logged 
Levi wrote:


There is also a utility called "remapkey" (included in this download) that allows you to change around the positions of keys MKLC can't access. I used it to switch backspace and caps lock, since I use the former much much more than the latter.

I might do this. I hate reaching all the way up for the backspace key, and I never use caps lock. If for some reason I have to type in caps, I hold down shift.


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