I've had a few comments (some off-line) about my last post, so I thought I'd write a little bit more.

First of all, some clarifications of the instructions for using the keyboard. A few warnings are generated when building the layout. The warnings can be ignored; they simply highlight the fact that a few characters can be generated by more than one key sequence. Also, you may need to reboot your machine after installing or changing your keyboard layouts; simply logging off might not be good enough. Finally, I should mention that keyboard layouts should work in Windows 2000 as well as Windows XP and beyond.

Eli provided more information about the shortcuts available in Word. To see the international character support in Word, search the help for "international characters". You'll find ways to type various accented characters, as well keys for '¿' and '¡'. Unfortunately, though some of these shortcuts work in some other Microsoft applications, some of them don't, and most non-Microsoft applications don't support any of them, so I prefer the consistency of my custom layout. But thanks for the info, Eli; I'm sure that these keyboard shortcuts are good enough for many people.

To explore any keyboard layout, you can, of course, use the Keyboard Layout Editor to import that layout. The user interface is pretty good; in particular, I like the way you can hover the mouse cursor over a "dead key" to see all of the possibilities.

If you want to play with your active keyboard in a slightly more user-friendly fashion, download the free Microsoft Visual Keyboard. (After you've installed it, find it under Start > Programs > Microsoft Office Tools.) It's not as visually appealing (if you ask me), but it does allow you to type directly into your application by clicking on the keyboard, and it has the option to stay on top of other windows.

If you're curious to know how I most frequently use my keyboard layout, these are a few of my favorite keys:

• AltGr+1 and AltGr+/: ¡ and ¿
• AltGr+[ and AltGr+]: « and » -- I sometimes use these instead of double-quotes in technical documentation.
• AltGr+' and AltGr+` and AltGr+~ and AltGr+^ and AltGr+": dead kêys för áçcèñts.

Some cool keys that I should get more familiar with:

• AltGr+c and AltGr+r: © and ®
• AltGr+C: ¢
• AltGr+:: °
• AltGr+9 and AltGr+0: smart ‘single quotes’

In fact, I'm motivated to add a few characters. The layout is updated below:

• AltGr+( and AltGr+): smart “double quotes”
• AltGr+.: bullet (•)
• AltGr+-: endash – (moved ¥ to AltGr+%)
• AltGr+_: emdash —

If you've already installed the previous version of my keyboard layout, you should probably uninstall it first (using the Add/Remove Programs control panel). And before you uninstall a keyboard layout, you should probably replace it with the standard "US" keyboard first. I apologize for not providing step-by-step procedures for all of this, but I'm sure you'll figure it out...

MyKeys.zip (4K)