Updated Italian Keyboard

What is it

The Updated Italian Keyboard is a character arrangement for the computer keyboard designed to provide a writing system appropriate to the spelling of the Italian language. The Updated Italian Keyboard has some differences from the traditional Italian keyboard because it supports accented capital vowels in the same way as any other capital letter.

The Updated Italian Keyboard also offers an easy mode for entering characters combined with diacritical marks used in Western languages based on the Latin alphabet.

This site sets out every detail related to the use of the Updated Italian Keyboard and distributes a free downloadable software implementation of it.

Although the differences between the mapping of Updated Italian Keyboard and the legends of the traditional Italian keyboard are very little, on this site it's also available a set of stickers for achieving a complete compatibility with the keyboard legends.

Typed with Updated Italian Keyboard

Typed with traditional Italian keyboard

Why

Whoever wrote texts in Italian by means of a computer equipped with a traditional Italian keyboard, realized that such a keyboard lacks some characters important to Italian language. This is the case with the missing capital accented vowels, of course, but also with other signs including the angled quotation marks, the dash or feminine ordinal indicator (^a).

For the input of these characters the writer interrupts the normal flow of writing and resorts to some expedient, shifting his attention from what to write, to how to write it. The most common expedients are:

• entering the code of the missing characters using the numeric keypad while keeping Alt key pressed;
• use the Windows’ program Character Map, and copy/paste from there;
• write lowercase accented vowels, then select them and invoke the word processor’s function “convert to uppercase”.

The Updated Italian keyboard solves this problem by placing directly on the keys all the characters needed to properly write in Italian.

If for "a few missing characters" everyone has managed to make do in his or her own way by using alternative methods of text entry, things get more complicated when, while remaining in the realm of languages based on the Latin alphabet, one needs to write in a language that employs diacritical signs different from those used in Italian, or the same signs but combined with other letters.

Thanks to the mechanism of layers, the Updated Italian keyboard solves this problem by allowing you to easily write of any word in Western languages whose writing is based on the Latin alphabet.

Interest in time for the search term “uppercase accented e” (source: Google)