U.S. International Extended Keyboard
US – International Extended
created by: Carly J. Born, Carleton College
copyright 2005
This installer will install a custom designed keyboard for use in English with additional support for inputting characters for Indic Transcription and Pinyin input. It is based on the US - International layout, which also allows for easy input of accented characters used in many European languages. It is provided as is with no promise of support outside of Carleton College. Install at your own risk.
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NOTE: the characters used for Indic Transcription and Pinyin are Unicode characters. Those characters will only work in programs that support Unicode and with fonts that contain them.
This keyboard layout is tested on Windows XP. It is untested on Windows 2000, but should work. It will not work on Windows 98 or earlier.
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Installation:
Double-click the icon called Install.msi to install the necessary files for this input method. After you double-click it will appear that nothing is happening. Be patient and you will soon see a dialog box telling you your installation is complete. Click Close to complete the install process.
It is recommended that you log out of Windows or Restart before continuing.
After the necessary files are installed, you must activate the keyboard:
- Go to Start > Settings > Control Panels > Regional and Language Options
- Click on the Language tab
- Click on the Details button under Text Services
- Click the Add button in lower part of the window under Installed Services
- In the window that appears the Input Language should be English (United States) and the Keyboard layout/IME should be US-International (Indic).
- Click OK to all open windows
This will allow you to choose between the standard US input and the US (Int’l Extended) inputs from the language bar. Because it is based on the US-International keyboard, it is possible to use the US (Int’l Extended) as your only input keyboard. To do this, remove any other English inputs from the Text Services dialog box (Start Menu > Settings > Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages).
Using US – Intl Extended
In the list below, a comma (,) means to release the previous keys prior to striking the next keys; a plus sign (+) means to continue holding the previous keys while striking the next keys listed.
|
acute accent, pinyin 2nd tone |
apostrophe, vowel |
(e.g. á é í ó ú) |
|
grave accent, pinyin 4th tone |
grave, vowel |
(e.g. à è ì ò ù) |
|
c cedilla |
apostrophe, c |
(e.g. ç) |
|
macron accent, pinyin 1st tone |
hyphen, vowel |
(e.g. ā ē ī ō ū ) |
|
vowel with umlaut |
double-quote, vowel |
(e.g. ä ë ï ö ü ÿ) |
|
vowel with circumflex |
shift+6, vowel |
(e.g. â ê î ô û) |
|
pinyin 3rd tone |
Shift + 5, vowel |
(e.g. ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ) |
|
ü with pinyin tones |
Accent, double-quote |
(e.g. ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ) |
|
letter with tilde |
tilde, letter |
(e.g. õ ñ ã) |
|
letter with dot below |
shift+period, letter |
(e.g. ạ ḅ ṇ ọ ẓ) |
|
« |
ctrl + alt + [ |
|
|
» |
ctrl + alt + ] |
|
|
€ |
ctrl + alt + 5 |
|
|
ß |
ctrl + alt + s |
*see note below |
|
ø |
ctrl + alt + l |
*see note below |
|
¿ |
ctrl + alt + / |
|
|
¡ |
ctrl + alt + 1 |
* see note below |
|
œ |
Right alt + k |
* Some key combinations will not work within Microsoft Word because of the standard keyboard shortcuts that Word employs. Below is a list of Word shortcut keys that you might want to disable in order to type some European characters
Disabling Word Shortcut Keys:
- In Word, open the Tools menu > Customize
- Click on the button at the bottom that says Keyboard
- Highlight the Category and Command that you want to disable
- Under the Current Keys box, highlight the conflicting shortcut key and then click the Remove button at the bottom of the screen.
- Close all windows when you are finished
1) In order to type ß, disable the command called DocSplit in the Windows & Help category.
2) To type ¡, disable the command called ApplyHeading1 in the Format category.
3) To type ø, disabling the ListBullet does not work. The work around that I found was to assign the appropriate keystroke to the ø character. You can do this by going to the Insert menu > Symbol, then highlight the ø character in the table and click on the Shortcut Key button. Here you can assign a shortcut key combination much the same way you removed it from the other locations.
Screen Shots of Layout
Below are screen shots of this keyboard layout. Dark gray keys signify dead keys.
Shift
AltGr (Right side ALT key)
Shift + AltGr
A Word about Code Pages
In order for this input method to work, you must use fonts that contain the characters necessary for Indic transliteration or Pinyin. For example, most common fonts contain the vowels with macron (e.g. ā, ō), but the number of fonts that include the n with a dot below (ṇ) are few. Generally, a font will support certain code pages of Unicode, but not all.
To understand this fully, it helps to know which characters are part of which code pages in Unicode. Below is a short list of the code pages needed to use the diacritics supported by this keyboard, and the characters that below to each.
Latin-1 Supplemental: vowels with accents grave, acute, circumflex, umlaut, etc.Latin Extended A: vowels with macron, œ ligature, e with pinyin 3rd tone, some consonants with cirucumflex
Latin Extended B: other vowels with pinyin 3rd tone, u with umlaut & tones
Latin Extended Additional: consonants with dot below Note that there are many other characters contained within these code pages, but they are not necessarily supported by this keyboard. For more information about Unicode code pages, see http://www.unicode.org/charts/
Most fonts contains some combination of the code pages listed above, but few contain the Latin Extended Additional code page which includes the consonants with the dot below. Below is a short list of fonts that contain these characters.
Serif Fonts: Gentium, GentiumAlt, Doulos SILSans Serif Fonts: Tahoma, Arial Unicode MS, MS Reference Sans Serif
Tahoma comes with the standard Windows operating system. Download Gentium, GentiumAlt and Doulos SIL from www.sil.org. Arial Unicode MS comes with Microsoft Office as an additional installation. It is usually referred as ‘International Font’.