Key Sets, Alphabets and Languages

Multiple key sets allow access to a very large number of characters, while keeping the button window reasonably small.

The key sets group characters by type, languages and expected usage. Many characters are repeated on several key sets so that the frequency of switching between them is reduced. Key sets are selected from the icon pop-up menu.

Punctuation and symbols shown by the 'more' button are the same for all key sets.

Latin - Western Europe

Accented and special letters used by most Western European languages, including Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Welsh, Basque, Catalan and others.

Most of these characters are well supported by standard fonts on all Windows versions. However, a few such as the Dutch IJ and some Welsh accents like Ŵ and Ŷ are only normally available to Unicode applications (may be a problem for old programs). Also the German capital Eszett ẞ is only included in the newer font versions. It is rarely used except for words in all-capitals.

Latin - Western Europe, Nordic

Similar to the above, but with a few changes to provide letters for the Nordic languages - Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Finnish and Northern Sami.

Note that Đ (crossed D) is not the same as Ð (Eth) - Eth is used by Icelandic and Faroese (occasionally elsewhere), whereas crossed D is used in Northern Sami, also by some Balkan languages.

Latin - Eastern Europe, Polish & Baltic

Includes accented letters used by Polish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Kashubian.

Latin - Eastern Europe, Danube

Includes accented letters used by Czech, Slovakian, Hungarian and Romanian.

The Romanian Ș and Ț (S and T with comma) will only work with some of the latest versions of standard Windows fonts. Many fonts do not include them and they are often entirely absent on Windows XP and Windows 2000 systems unless they have been specially updated. Though technically incorrect, S and T cedilla (Ş and Ţ) are often used in their place so those characters are also included in this key set. D with comma was also once used in Romanian, though now obsolete it might be seen in archaic words and names. There is no single-letter encoding for this letter but Ḑ (D cedilla) is sometimes substituted and is included here.

Latin - Southeast Europe & Turkic

Accented letters for Croatian, Serbian (Latin), Bosnian (Latin), Slovenian, Albanian, Arbëresh, Montenegrin, Maltese, Turkish, Turkmen, Azeri and Kurdish (Hawar).

Latin - Austronesian / Oceanic

Accented and special letters for the Austronesian languages. This covers Māori, Hawaiian, Samoan, Malay-Indonesian and many others including some indigenous Australian languages such as those of the Aṉangu.

With so many different languages used across this huge and diverse geographic area some letter variations may be absent and there are some that have no single character representation. The ʻokina is part of many Polynesian alphabets and is the correct mark for glottal stop. The modifier apostrophe is also often used as an alternative, so also included.

Latin - Esperanto

Esperanto is unusual because it uses a few letter diacritics that are not common to other language groups and are not found on any standard keyboard. It therefore has its own small keyset. The accents are well supported by many unicode fonts. The digraph DZ is provided although its use is somewhat debatable. For historical purposes the spesmilo currency sign is also given, but very few fonts include it. Other accented letter may occur in names and loan-words but they can be found in the relevant key-sets.

Cyrillic - East Slavic

Full Cyrillic alphabet letters for Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian.

Cyrillic - Bulgarian

The Cyrillic alphabet for Bulgarian. Also includes additional letters for Moldovan.

Some older font versions do not include Ѐ.

Cyrillic - West Balkan

The Cyrillic alphabet for Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian (Cyrillic), Montenegrin and Macedonian.

The Montenegrin letters З acute and С acute are not given here as they currently have no single-letter encoding.

Some older font versions do not include Ѐ and Ѝ, as used in Macedonian.

Cyrillic - Turkic and Mongolic

The Cyrillic alphabet letters for Kazakh, Azeri, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Mongolian and others.

Some older font versions do not include a few of the letter variations.

Greek

The modern Greek alphabet.

Note that multiple accented forms of two letters (ΐ and ΰ) do not have upper case versions. The letter Σ has two lower case forms, with a variation for when it occurs as the final letter of a word.

Polytonic Greek (Pro edition only)

The complete Greek alphabet with its many accented letters, as used by Classical and Medieval Greek.

The keypanel is unusually large for this set due to large number of vowel diacritic options. Empty gaps in the upper case keys indicate there is no equivalent upper case form of the lower case character below.

The normal 24 alphabet letters along with their diacritic forms are given first and take up most of the key panel. The final two key rows give archaic and other less common characters, plus some additional punctuation marks.

As with other keysets it is essential that the target application is using a suitable unicode font in order to display the characters correctly. Some fonts supporting the Greek alphabet do not include all polytonic diacritics or the more rarely used characters.

Georgian

There are three Georgian scripts - Mkhedruli is the modern one in common use, while the older Asomtavruli and Nuskhuri are sometimes used for historical and ecclesiastical writings. Each entire script is presented on the panel, modern Mkhedruli at the top followed by Asomtavruli then Nuskhuri.

Unusally the Georgian scripts are single case, although the older ones are were sometimes used in combination for titles and chapter capitals (Khutsuri). Asomtavruli is regarded as upper case, while the others are lower.

Georgian script is also used for the related languages such as Mingrelian, Svan and Laz. Obsolete and additional characters are sometimes used, so are included here.

Modern Georgian letters are supported by a few recent standard fonts, but the older scripts need a font with extensive Unicode support, such as 'Arial Unicode MS' or 'DejaVu Sans', or a specific Georgian font.

Armenian

The Armenian alphabet letters and specific Armenian punctuation marks.

There are few standard fonts that include Armenian letters, but some with good Unicode support do, for example Sylfaen, Arial Unicode MS or DejaVu Sans. There are also specific Armenian fonts available for download.

The Armenian Dram currency symbol is quite new and font support is limited.

Ogham (Pro edition only)

Archaic Celtic writing system that was mainly used for inscriptions found in Ireland, West Wales and other places around the Irish Sea. Sometimes referred to as the "Celtic Tree Alphabet" despite being not strictly an alphabet. Each letter is closely associated with specific trees and has traditional significance, although there is some variation of interpretation.

Font support is limited but Ogham characters are included in some free fonts such as DejaVu, Noto Sans and Babelstone.

Runic (Pro edition only)

Ancient writing system of the Northern European Germanic peoples including the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. All unicode rune characters are provided and represent several historical variations. These may be filtered using a special section of the configuration settings which enable or disable the relevant key buttons. The keys may also be sequenced either by their traditional Futhark order or by their Latin alphabetic equivalents.

The target application must be using a suitable unicode font to display rune characters, such as the Babelstone fonts.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) (Pro edition only)

Unicode characters and diacritics for phonetic notation, much used by linguists and lexicographers. Mostly based on Latin characters with various additions and modifications.

Most commonly used, standard IPA characters are included in this keyset, with mouse-over text describing their function. Normal lower-case Latin a-z are included, with their respective mouse-over IPA definitions, although they are also available on standard keyboards. Also a few old-specification characters that may occasionally still be used. Other obsolete symbols and those for disordered speech and specific Sinology use are ommited. The keys are in loose alphabetic sequence. For functional context, reference to the readily available IPA charts is recommended.

In addition to single-character (spacing) diacritics and suprasegmentals, the two lower rows of the keyset give non-spacing, combining diacritics, which modify the previously typed character. When in character output mode these may not work with all applications and fonts, but are well supported by word processing applications, web browsers and others.

For character display the target application needs to be using a font with good Unicode support, many are suitable such as Arial, Sergoe UI, DejaVu and others.

Roman Numerals (Pro edition only)

A small key set giving the Roman numerals available as single unicode characters. Of course Roman numbers can also be made with normal letters but the single character form may useful in some situations.

Supported by a number of common fonts including Arial and DejaVu.

Emoticons

Single character unicode Emoiticons (Emoji). These may not display correctly with Windows XP, depending on system settings.

Font support is fairly limited but they are available in some such as Sergoe UI Symbol and DejaVu Sans, however the actual appearance of the glyphs can vary considerably.

Other symbol entities (Pro edition only)

A selection of additional symbol characters. Includes 5 keyboard punctuation keys that are commonly used as HTML entities. The remainder are mostly mathematical symbols and others, many of which have standard HTML entity names.

Some mathematical symbols appear very similar to other punctuation marks, but are in fact distinct characters with their own code points. Especially useful in technical documentation.