Jun 3, 2008

Typing in "International"

Ditch your German, French, Portuguese and any other non-English keyboard layout because the English-International is here to save all those in need of special symbols in their daily typing.

For example, the German layout. It's a waste of space how the three characters ü, ä amd ö get a dedicated key. It takes me an additional double key press (Shift and double-quotes) to add the two little dots/strokes over those vowels and use the free keys for punctuation. Well, all those years of practice made me a relatively fast (blind) typer so an additional key press marginally affects me, but having to write in several languages, French, Portuguese, German and English, this flexibility is VERY welcome.

MS has a support article about this layout, it's pretty wicked:
How To Use the United States-International Keyboard Layout in Windows XP - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306560

My favorite section of the article:

Press this keyThen press this keyResultant character
' (APOSTROPHE)CÇ
'(APOSTROPHE)e, y, u, i, o, aé, ý, ú, í, ó, á
"(QUOTATION MARK)e, u, i, o, aë, ü, ï, ö, ä
`(ACCENT GRAVE)e, u, i, oè, ù, ì, ò
~(TILDE)o, nõ, ñ
^(CARET)e, u, i, o, aê, û, î, ô, â



ÿØú®ß trül¥,

n.-

PS: no pics here, sorry
PPS: This post is dedicated to my brother Daniel, who celebrates his birthday today, the date of this post

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