The QWERTY keyboard driver

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Remark: A brief description of achieving national characters is available here.

To read the page you need the font named Lucida Sans Unicode, available on Windows 98 SE and Windows Millennium systems.

All the 7-bit coded ASCII characters are obtained by pressing a key of the alphanumeric block of the keyboard either alone or with contemporary pressing of the Shift key. These characters are independent of the set-up codepage.

the key alone	with the Shift key

So called dead keys are marked on the pictures: to obtain the symbols visible on them, you should press the Space key in addition.

Characters coded with the 8th bit set are so called national characters or ANSI characters. They can be various depending on the codepage. The present driver of the keyboard is suitable, first of all, for the Windows-1250 (Central Europe) page being used on MS Windows system for writing Polish texts – the pictures below have been made for namely this codepage; nevertheless it also lets the Windows-1252 (Western Europe) as well as Windows-1254 (Turkish) codepages be used relatively comfortably.

Remark: the use of the given codepage makes the placing of the characters of another codepage impossible, e.g. you cannot write one plain text containing both Polish (ą, Ą, ć, Ć, …) and Turkish (ğ, Ğ, ı, İ, …) characters. In HTML documents, like this, you can do it only thanks to some special tricks.

The use of the Right Alt key

The use of the Right Alt key lets you achieve all the typical Polish letters as well as some other characters:

Right Alt	Right Alt as well as Shift

The use of the dead keys

You can obtain several characters by pressing, one after the other, a combination being a dead key and a given key alone or with the Shift key. E.g. the pressing ` and next Shift + a lets you achieve Ą.

The dead key `
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ~ (Shift + `)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ˛ (RAlt + `)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ´ (RAlt + 1)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ˙ (RAlt + 2)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ˝ (RAlt + 3)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ­ (RAlt + # i.e. RAlt + Shift + 3)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ˇ (RAlt + 6)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ˆ (RAlt + ^ i.e. RAlt + Shift + 6)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ¨ (RAlt + 7)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ¸ (RAlt + 8)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ˘ (RAlt + 9)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ° (RAlt + 0)
the key alone	with the Shift key
The dead key ‘ (RAlt + W i.e. RAlt + Shift + w)
the key alone	with the Shift key

How to obtain a given symbol or character?

Remarks:

• RAlt means Right Alt.
• A brief description of achieving national characters is available here

Remark: Certain combinations of the keys look like nonsensical and hard to remember. It is so because:

• The driver is suitable for three different codepages; the combination that is nonsensical in one of the codepages is easy to remember in another one.
• For some characters, especially those absent in Windows-1250, like ², ³, ½ or the Turkish ş (coded in a different way than the Rumanian one) etc, it is hard to find a sensible combination that would not destroy the existing system.

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