US-International Keyboard

What is US-International Keyboard and how is it related to Z-scale model trains you may wonder. Let me explain. When modeling German prototype and dealing with German-built material it is always a good idea to understand at least a little bit German. For instance, it is nice to understand what the word "Kühlwagen" means when you see it printed on a nice new car you just bought. Hence the need to type sometimes German words.

About Keyboard Layouts

Personal computers sold in different countries have slightly different keyboard layouts which in many cases is plain silly as people familiar with one national keyboard layout get more or less confused when using a personal computer in another country. There are some historical and commercial reasons for this lack of a universal norm. I should mention that in this article I am referring to languages and keyboards which use the West-European character set (English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian). It is often assumed that typing special characters, which are part of the alphabet of a certain language, requires a language specific keyboard. This is not true with West-European languages.

US-International

There is a fairly unknown but very practical way to use a normal US-layout keyboard in PC's to type foreign language text. US-layout keyboards can be purchased easily in almost any country in the world and are a good choice for anyone needing to type in more than one language. This solution is based on switching the keyboard layout to the 'US-International'. The solution works with PCs in the Windows-environment (Windows 3.1, Windows95, Windows98, Windows NT and Windows 2000).

Main Benefits

Required Material

Supported Languages

Installation Instructions

Note that these installation instructions are more or less same for all flavors of Windows only the names of some items may be slihtly different. You should have the installation CD of your operating system handy unless it's contents is on your hard disk which is the case with many computers shipped with Windows pre-installed.

  1. Open Control Panel (It is in Start-Settings-Control Panel)
  2. Go to the Keyboard settings (double-click keyboard icon)
  3. Click on Language-tab (or 'Input Locales' in Windows 2000)
  4. Your current language selection shows in the box.
  5. When your current language is selected, click on the Properties-button
  6. Click the button on right of the Keyboard layout box to open the drop-down list
  7. Select US-International from the list of keyboard layouts.
  8. Click OK. Click OK.
  9. Your computer may need to be restarted at this point. Follow the instructions on screen.

Using US-International Keyboard

Accented Characters and C-cedilla

The US-International keyboard works like a regular US-keyboard with few exceptions. There are five dead keys on the keyboard. A dead key means that rather than producing a respective character on screen immediately upon pressing the key, a key-press initiates an entering process for a key with an accent or other variation of the basic character. To enter an accented character proceed as follows:

  1. Press the dead-key of the desired accent (any of the characters: ^, `, ~, ' or ")
  2. Press the character to be accented

If the character can accept an accent the previous process will produce an accented character. Most typical characters that can take an accent are vowels (like á,è,ô,ï etc.). If the letter following the dead-key accent does not have a variety with an accent, the sequence will produce two characters: the accent alone followed by a letter. Like for instance a single quotation mark and k ('k).

Dead Keys on the keyboardThe only inconvenience of the US-international keyboard is that producing the characters of the dead-keys alone (quotation for instance) requires also two key-presses. The dead-key should be followed by a press on space bar in this case. See the picture on left for the location of five dead-keys on the keyboard. On some keyboards, especially on laptop computers, their location may be different. Note that tilde, circumflex and umlaut require holding the Shift-key depressed while pressing a dead-key. Other Special Characters In addition to accented varieties of normal alphabets many languages have other special characters. For instance in German alphabet there is a special character called "sharp-s" (ß). Such characters have special key-combinations in US-international keyboard. For instance sharp-s is logically Ctrl-Alt-s ( Ctrl and Alt keys are depressed when pressing 's'). The key combinations for such characters can be checked using Windows95 applet 'Character Map'. Note that Character Map does not show key combinations using dead-keys, which, on the other hand, are easy to remember. If you are using Windows 2000, it comes with a new 'improved' Character Map which unfortunately does not show key combinations properly anymore.

Sometimes applications reserve certain key combinations for their own purposes. If you have difficulties in using any of the US-International keyboard's keystrokes in a certain application it is very possible that the application overrides keyboard settings. For instance Microsoft Word for Windows (version 6.0 or later) does this. If you want to use US-International keyboard with WfW, you have to remove any conflicting key assignments. Microsoft provides the instructions for doing this.