A proposal for an improvement on the Italian keyboard layout.
Posted: 02 May 2018, 16:49
First, a disclaimer: I am not Italian, but I did sing Italian songs while I was a kid (you don't want to know which ones, though). Now, with that out of the way...
As you know, I like to tinker with the logical layouts that exist on top of the keyboards' physical layouts, and I've made several custom ones for different needs. After doing a revamp of the French national layout, I focused my attention on the Italian one, with which it shares one of its most notorious design defects — the mixing of different accented letters on the base and Shift layers of a single key, making it impossible to type them in uppercase.
I figured I could make an improved version of the Italian national layout that corrected this flaw and would better serve the modern needs of the country. The design had to fulfill the following criteria:
The symbols in green are those that already exist in the Italian layout but have been moved elsewhere; the symbols in blue are newly added in this layout; the dead keys are marked in red. The euro symbol (€) is marked in green to make note that now it's present ONLY on AltGr-E.
The main features are:
EDIT: I've made a few adjustments to the layout and updated the graphics.
As you know, I like to tinker with the logical layouts that exist on top of the keyboards' physical layouts, and I've made several custom ones for different needs. After doing a revamp of the French national layout, I focused my attention on the Italian one, with which it shares one of its most notorious design defects — the mixing of different accented letters on the base and Shift layers of a single key, making it impossible to type them in uppercase.
- Problematic key asssignments in the Italian layout.
- NuovItal.conflictos.png (55.51 KiB) Viewed 4567 times
- Eliminate the direct assignments of accented vowels (and Ç) in favor of two dead keys for the grave and the acute accents, freeing up space for other symbols.
- Keep untouched most of the rest of the extant assignments.
- The new assignments should be intuitive and easy to remember.
- Keep it optimized for the Italian language first, THEN make accomodations for the particular needs of regional languages/dialects (Venetian, Sicilian, etc.) plus Maltese, THEN consider the languages of other neighboring countries (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, German, etcetera).
- Add the typographical symbols that are commonly used but aren't present on the extant layout, including the Italian Lira symbol (as opposed to the Sterling Pound symbol).
- New Italian layout.
- NuovItal.kle2.png (17.48 KiB) Viewed 4567 times
The main features are:
- Besides Ç and the accented vowels, eight symbols have been moved elsewhere (°, @, §, `, #, ^, + and *); square brackets and braces remain in the same keys but have been moved out of the AltGr layers. All other extant assignments remain untouched.
- The grave and acute accents are available as dead keys on the base layer in the home row. The same keys on the Shift layer sport the circumflex and the diaeresis diacritics, and breve and tilde on the AltGr layer. AltGr-minus contains a dead key for the macron diacritic.
- Ç is now on AltGr-C.
- All the vowel/diacritic combinations that some languages and dialects require are covered by the five main diacritic keys (the breve and the macron diacritics were included for writing in Latin). The extra consonants, ligatures and typographic symbols that are needed have assignments on the AltGr layer: Ḍ (Sicilian), Ł (Venetian), Æ (Franco-Provençal, French), Ċ, Ġ, Ħ and Ż (Maltese), ẞ (German), Ñ (Spanish), · (Catalan), etcetera. Note the presence of a long S as well.
- This is an ISO layout, but a provision is made for ANSI keyboards, by having a secondary assignment for the characters <, >, ≤ and ≥.
EDIT: I've made a few adjustments to the layout and updated the graphics.
