There are shortcuts on most English keyboards for entering characters such as á and é.
But I can never seem to remember what those shortcuts are.
Fortunately, there is TypeIt, an online editor that gives you the ability to input non-ASCII characters used by languages such as Spanish, Hungarian, and Russian. Here’s a screen shot:
Operating systems like OSX and Windows also give you the ability to change your keyboard virtually — but that can be a real pain if you only need to input an á.
Tomasz Szynalski launched TypeIt in 2004, and the site gets about 35,000 visits a month. Some people use the editor like I do — to crank out a few characters — while others use it to write entire letters. Russian is the latest keyboard added — and I hope to see more to come.
The site is www.typeit.org.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Tony Ruscoe // Jul 28, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Have you seen the Google Virtual Keyboard API which allows you to insert a virtual keyboard into your own website? Not only does it provide a virtual keyboard UI, but it also maps your keys to the virtual keyboard while it’s switch on.
Here’s the sample code:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/#virtual_keyboard
And here’s the blog post announcing it:
http://googleajaxsearchapi.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-virtual-keyboard-api.html
2 Fred // Jul 29, 2009 at 9:02 am
Thanks a lot John,
It is great you can also generate the upper case caracters (very useful in French, for ex. for É)
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