Keyboard layouts for Windows: latin american extended.

This keyboard layout extends Windows' default latin american one; unlike this one, it allows typing almost all the characters used by the european latin-derived alphabets (Albanian, Asturian, Azeri, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Czech, Danish, Esperanto, Estonian, Faeroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Leonese, Lithuanian, Maltese, Manx, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovak, Upper and Lower Sorbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Walloon and a host of others; several non-european languages are also covered to a great extent).

Design requirements.

This layout was built with the following requirements in mind:

• It strives to be a pan-european keyboard, but first and foremost is a pan-iberian one: it's optimized for spanish-speaking users (just like the original latin american layout), and also allows typing in other european languages, by containing characters as æ, ß, Ð, ʒ, etcetera, and diacritics that allow typing characters as å, ő, ǿ, ŭ, etcetera (unlike the original, which doesn't). The most common typographic characters are also covered (·, ª, ¶, §, etcetera).

  For example, the user can type correctly in Icelandic (since all the necessary characters are available), but the Icelandic keyboard layout is more comfortable to type in said language on a regular basis.

  As explained above, there is full support for the peninsular languages (Aranese, Asturian, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish [along with minor ones, as Aragonese, Extremaduran, Leonese and Mirandese, which are covered by the needs of the former group]). This has a higher priority than the needs of the rest of the european languages, although a reasonable balance is achieved (compare this with the pan-iberian layout, where the needs of the former always outrank the needs of the latter).

• Is a superset of the original latin american layout: not a single preexisting key assignment is changed.

• For each diacritic (both preexisting and new ones), all the available Unicode precomposed characters are added, even if they're not needed (for example, the diacritic dot below is needed only for Ḥ and Ḷ (used in Asturian), but Unicode defines the characters Ạ, Ḅ, Ḍ, Ẹ, Ḥ, Ị, Ḳ, Ḷ, Ṃ, Ṇ, Ọ, Ṛ, Ṣ, Ṭ, Ụ, Ṿ, Ẉ, Ỵ and Ẓ, so all of them are included).

• In the original latin american layout, the keystrokes needed to type the characters ` and ^ are uncomfortable, which is problematic for Unix users. This layout provides a better way of typing both characters.

• The € symbol is added, following the European Union recommendations to this effect.

The layout.

This is the latin american extended layout:

Dead keys.

This layout has a lot of dead keys, which are used for diacritics and other things.

Diacritics.

The following table details each of the defined diacritics (the ones that already exist in the original latin american layout are marked in red):

Note: the letters ǰ, ẗ, ẘ and ẙ don't have corresponding uppercase forms in Unicode.

The dead key AltGr‑dash allows typing characters with a bar or a stroke (it's not a unique diacritic, but rather several look-a-likes that aren't necessarily related):

Greek alphabet.

The dead key AltGr‑G allows typing greek letters (uppercase and lowercase), although diacritics (monotonic or polytonic) are not supported. The available keystrokes follow the regular Greek layout.

Note: the keystroke AltGr‑Shift‑G is not assigned; it's reserved for a possible future expansion.

Currency.

The dead key AltGr‑4 allows typing the symbols for several currencies.

Notes:

• There isn't a dead key combination for the $ symbol, as is considered unnecessary.
• The most commonly used currencies (euro, pound sterling and yen) have their own direct keystrokes (AltGr‑E, AltGr‑L and AltGr‑Y, respectively).
• Unicode defines other two currency symbols that aren't included in this layout:
  • ₰: the german pfennig; the symbol fell into disuse in the '50s decade.
  • ₳: the argentine austral; it lived for less than seven years and was replaced after being destroyed by the irresponsible argentine economy's hyperinflation... frankly, it doesn't deserve being immortalized in Unicode. There, I've said it.

Comments.

• All the defined characters correspond to the Unicode precomposed ones. If a particular combination isn't precomposed in Unicode, this layout does not include it and must be written with two characters (for example, n̈ [n with diaeresis] must be obtained with U+004e and U+0308).

  That said, some precomposed letters and ligatures were not included, due to the limited number of keys in the keyboard:

  • Ŀ and ŀ (L geminada in a single character) (Catalan language style recommendations state that the regular L and the punt volat are to be preferred: L· and l·)
  • DŽ, Dž, dž, DZ, Dz and dz (in Slovak DZ is a single letter)
  • ligatures IJ and ij (used in Dutch)
  • ligatures LJ, Lj, lj, NJ, Nj and nj (used in some Slavic languages)
  • ʼn (user in Afrikaans)
  • Ƿ ƿ [wynn] and Ȝ ȝ [yogh] (used in Old English)

• Some letters cannot be included because Unicode doesn't define them:

  • c trencada [broken c] (NO A LA CEDILLA! Tranqueu la c.)
  • ą̊ [a with ring and ogonek], used in Elfdalian
  • a̋; [a with double acute accent], used in Slovak
  • n̈ [n with diaeresis], used in Malagasy (and by Spin̈al Tap)
  • y̨ [y with ogonek], used in Elfdalian

• The German letter Eszett (ß) [not to be confused with Greek letter Beta (β)] has an uppercase version defined since Unicode 5.1 (ẞ).

• The Turkish alphabet and derivatives have two distinct i letters: dotted (i) and dotless (ı). The uppercase versions are, respectively, İ and I. In this layout, ı is obtained with AltGr‑I, and İ is obtained with AltGr‑Shift‑I.

• Do not confuse the letters eth (Ð and ð) [used in icelandic] and D with stroke (Đ and đ) [used in South Slavic languages]. The former is obtained only with AltGr‑D and the latter exclusively with AltGr‑dash+D.

• Some extended-latin letters have their own direct AltGr keystrokes even though they can be obtained using dead keys:

  • Å (AltGr‑V or AltGr‑Shift‑++A): frequently used in several Scandinavian languages; also, it's necessary to be able to type Ǻ and ǻ.
  • Ç (AltGr‑C or AltGr‑comma+C): used in Portuguese and other romance languages, and used in Catalan as a replacement for the c trencada; also, it's necessary to be able to type Ḉ and ḉ.
  • Ł (AltGr‑U or AltGr‑dash+L): used by the spanish-speaking roman catholic population due to Pope John Paul II's name (Karol Wojtyła).
  • Ø (AltGr‑B or AltGr‑dash+O): frequently used in several Scandinavian languages; also, it's necessary to be able to type Ǿ and ǿ.

• Several dead key combinations are paired to the resulting character to avoid bothersome typing errors. For example, if the user mistakenly types AltGr‑4+AltGr‑e instead of AltGr‑4+e, the result will be € instead of ¤€. In the same fashion, AltGr‑~+Ñ will result in Ñ, etcetera. In the author's opinion, this is extremely comfortable.

• The ¤ character is assigned to the keystrokes AltGr‑< and AltGr‑Shift‑<. If this layout is used on a 101/104 keys keyboard (like most of the ones sold in USA), said character can still be obtained typing AltGr‑4+space.

  For the same reason, the characters < and > are also assigned to AltGr‑Shift‑Q and AltGr‑Shift‑E, respectively.

• The characters ∆ (increment, U+2206) and µ (micro sign, U+00b5) are not the same ones as the Greek letters Δ (uppercase Delta, U+0394) and μ (lowercase Mu, U+03bc).

Excluded alphabets, letters, diacritics and characters.

It's impossible to include ALL of Unicode. It's not practical to include all of the latin-derived letters and variations. Because of this, it was decided to restrict this layout's scope to european alphabets, excluding the following (besides the stuff listed in the previous section):

• The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The alert reader will have noticed the inclusion of the schwa character (Ə ə), perhaps its most famous member. It's included because the Azeri alphabet uses it.

  Richard Collins created an International Phonetic Alphabet keyboard layout.

• Latin-derived or IPA-derived letters used in african languages (for example: Ǝ, Ƙ, Ƥ, Ʊ, ʔ, etcetera).

• Underside diacritics unused in european languages:

  • circumflex below: Ḓ, Ḙ, Ḽ, etcetera.
  • breve accent below: Ḫ.
  • diaeresis below: Ṳ.
  • macron below: Ḇ, Ḏ, Ḵ, etcetera.
  • ring below: ḁ.

• Double diacritics: ǟ; ệ, ǭ, Ṩ, etcetera (except Ḉ ḉ, Ǻ ǻ and Ǿ ǿ). This means that this layout can't be used to type properly in lithuanian, as the language makes heavy use of letters with two diacritics (even three, in a few cases).

• Vietnamese language: the vowels ơ and ư are missing, as well as the diacritics hook (dḕu hỏi) and horn (dḕu móc), and the double diacritics (see item above).

• Greek alphabet diacritics (polytonic and monotonic).

• Other diacritics: middle tilde, diagonal stroke, high bar, descender, etcetera.

The installer.

This layout can be installed on Windows operating systems (2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista) using the latin american extended layout installer.

All rights reserved by Miguel Farah to the modifications made upon the initial layout. Last update: 13/02/2009.

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Keyboard layouts for Windows.