Updated Italian Keyboard

What is it

Updated Italian Keyboard is an arrangement of characters in the computer keyboard designed to provide a writing system tailored to the othographic needs of the Italian language. The Updated Italian Keyboard has minor differences compared to the traditional Italian keyboard because it supports the capital vowels with accents in the same way as any other capital letter.

It also provides an easy mode for entering characters with diacritical marks used in the Western languages based on the Roman alphabet.

This web site explains every detail about the Updated Italian Keyboard, which is also available for free as a keyboard driver.

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

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. It is the case of the missing capital accented vowels, of course, but also of other signs such as the angled quotation marks, the dash or feminine ordinal indicator (^a).

For entering these characters the writer disrupts the normal flow of writing and uses some expedient, which often distracts their 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 anyone was able to fend for themselves getting by “a few characters missing” by using alternative typing methods, things get more complicated when, although remaining within the scope of languages that use the Roman alphabet, there’s the need to write in a language that uses either different diacritical marks than those used in Italian, or same marks but combined with other letters.

Thanks to the layers mechanism, the Updated Italian keyboard solves this problem by allowing easy writing of any word in Western languages based on the Roman alphabet.

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