DownloadFree Windows keyboard driver that extends AltGr to provide comprehensive accented character support (including multi-accented characters), international punctuation, IPA, medieval characters, mathematical and non-mathematical symbols, and more.
Designed for UK keyboards and installs as a regular keyboard layout option. I might adapt it for US keyboards if there's enough interest.
The driver should be stable (built using MSKLC, which is mature) but classified as beta because it has not yet been tested on a wide variety of systems (please give feedback!)
Note that this can't display characters not supported in fonts on your system! Also if you enter an unusual symbol in some programs such as MS Word the font might switch to one which includes that symbol – this isn't anything the driver can control.
Features
- Installs as a regular Windows keyboard layout, selectable through regional settings.
- Only keystrokes using AltGr are affected, so you don't need to change how you normally type.
- Includes all the characters used by any common language based on the Latin alphabet (implements most unicode characters in “Latin” sections).
- Provides dedicated right and left quotation marks from the core layout, enabling you to bypass “smart-quotes“ and get your quotes right even when mixing languages („ “ ” ‚ ‘ ’ « » ‹ ›).
- Uses “chained dead-keys” to provide intuitive key sequences (e.g. “AltGr+' ' o” → ő, “AltGr+' , c” → ḉ, “AltGr+% 1 2” → ½, “AltGr+& t s” → ʦ, “AltGr+5 & A E” → ᴁ). This enables even Vietnamese (with its complex multi-accented character requirements) to be supported (e.g. “AltGr+" ¬ u” → ṻ).
- Symbols include easy access to n-dash and m-dash (through “AltGr+-” → – and “AltGr+_” → —), mathematical symbols (including “AltGr+/ =” → ≠), currencies, fractions, ringed letters and numbers (e.g. ①), arrows (e.g. ⇒) and more.
- Supports medieval characters (including ð and ȝ on the core layout, and modifying small letters such as “o AltGr+7 e” → oͤ; most unicode-adopted MUFI-recommended letters are supported).
- For advanced users, supports combining characters that can add accents to any character (e.g. "AltGr+~ <sp>" will add a tilde to the previous character; combinations such as ø̣̃́ are possible). This can be useful for obscure situations where a dedicated unicode character doesn't exist.
- Supports IPA (including combining characters to render e.g. d͡ʒ, as “AltGr+d AltGr+( - AltGr+@ z”).
- Supports the new German capital S-Sharp character (ẞ) as AltGr+S (for systems which support it, generally Windows 7+).
- Provides access to Greek characters and the basic Cyrillic alphabet.
Project Samples
