Brazil Keyboard

[Tammara Freimark]

Thereare a large number of QWERTY keyboard layouts used for languages written in the Latin script. Many of these keyboards include some additional symbols of other languages, but there also exist layouts that were designed with the goal to be usable for multiple languages (see Multilingual variants). This list gives general descriptions of QWERTY keyboard variants along with details specific to certain operating systems, with emphasis on Microsoft Windows.

English-speaking Canadians have traditionally used the same keyboard layout as in the United States, unless they are in a position where they have to write French on a regular basis. French-speaking Canadians respectively have favoured the Canadian French (CFR) and the Canadian French ACNOR (CFA) keyboard layouts (see below).

The BS 4822:1994 standard did not make any use of the AltGr key and lacked support for any non-ASCII characters other than and . It also assigned a key for the non-ASCII character broken bar (), but lacks one for the far more commonly used ASCII character vertical bar (). It also lacked support for various diacritics used in the Welsh alphabet, and the Scottish Gaelic alphabet; and also is missing the letter yogh, ȝ, used very rarely in the Scots language. Therefore, various manufacturers have modified or extended the BS 4822 standard:

Support for the diacritics needed for Scots Gaelic and Welsh was added to Windows and ChromeOS using a "UK-extended" setting (see below); Linux and X-Windows systems have an explicit or redesignated compose key for this purpose.

The arrangement of the character input keys and the Shift keys contained in this layout is specified in the US national standard ANSI-INCITS 154-1988 (R1999) (formerly ANSI X3.154-1988 (R1999)),[2] where this layout is called "ASCII keyboard". The complete US keyboard layout, as it is usually found, also contains the usual function keys in accordance with the international standard ISO/IEC 9995-2, although this is not explicitly required by the US American national standard.

US keyboards are used not only in the United States, but also in many other English-speaking jurisdictions (except the UK and Ireland) such as Canada, Australia, the Caribbean nations, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Singapore, New Zealand, and South Africa. Local spelling in these regions sometimes conforms more closely to British English usage, creating the undesirable side effect of also setting the language to US English rather than the local orthography. This conflict would be fixed in Windows 8 and later versions when Microsoft separated the keyboard and language settings. US keyboards also see use in Indonesia and the Philippines, the former of which uses the same 26-letter alphabet as English.

The US keyboard layout has a second Alt key instead of the AltGr key and does not use any dead keys; this makes it inefficient for all but a handful of languages. On the other hand, the US keyboard layout (or the similar UK layout) is occasionally used by programmers in countries where the keys for [] are located in less convenient positions on the locally customary layout.[3]

On some keyboards the enter key is bigger than traditionally and takes up also a part of the line above, more or less the area of the traditional location of the backslash key (\). In these cases the backslash is located in alternative places.[4] It can be situated one line above the default location, on the right of the equals sign key (=).[5][6] Sometimes it is placed one line below its traditional situation, on the right of the apostrophe key (') (in these cases the enter key is narrower than usual on the line of its default location).[7] It may also be two lines below its default situation on the right of a narrower than traditionally right shift key.[8]

The typewriter came to the Czech-speaking area in the late 19th century, when it was part of Austria-Hungary where German was the dominant language of administration. Therefore, Czech typewriters have the QWERTZ layout.

However, with the introduction of imported computers, especially since the 1990s, the QWERTY keyboard layout is frequently used for computer keyboards. The Czech QWERTY layout differs from QWERTZ in that the characters (e.g. @$& and others) missing from the Czech keyboard are accessible with AltGr on the same keys where they are located on an American keyboard. In Czech QWERTZ keyboards the positions of these characters accessed through AltGr differs.

The Canadian French (CFR) keyboard layout is commonly used in Canada by French-speaking Canadians. It is the most common layout for laptops and stand-alone keyboards aimed at the Francophone market. Unlike the AZERTY layout used in France and Belgium, it is a QWERTY layout and as such is also relatively commonly used by English speakers in the US and Canada (accustomed to using US standard QWERTY keyboards) for easy access to the accented letters found in some French loanwords. It can be used to type all accented French characters, as well as some from other languages, and serves all English functions as well. It is popular mainly because of its close similarity to the basic US keyboard commonly used by English-speaking Canadians and Americans, historical use of US-made typewriters by French-Canadians. The right Alt key is reconfigured as an AltGr key that gives easy access to a further range of characters (marked in blue and red on the keyboard image. Blue indicates an alternative character that will display as typed. Red indicates a dead key: the diacritic will be applied to the next vowel typed.) The traditional Canadian French keyboard from IBM must use an ISO keyboard. The French guillemets located on the extra key are needed to type proper French, they are not optional. A dvorak version (traditional Canadian french layout) is also supported by Microsoft Windows.

The "hybrid" keyboard layout, often referred incorrectly as "canadian multilingual" or "bilingual" is a mix between the US English and the Canadian French layout over an ISO keyboard. This layout has been developed by manufacturers as a cost saving strategy first for their low end laptops. They tend to be extended to the mid-range laptops in the recent years and sold wrongly as a "French" keyboard. Today, this layout seems to be criticized by both anglophones and francophones.[13][14] The anglophones accustomed to the ANSI keyboard complain about the small ISO shift on left and francophones can find these legends hard to read and messy. In this keyboard, the key names are translated in both French and English. This keyboard can be netherless useful for programming.

The Icelandic keyboard layout is different from the standard QWERTY keyboard because the Icelandic alphabet has some special letters, most of which it shares with the other Nordic countries:/, /, /, and /. (/ also occurs in Norwegian, Danish and Faroese, / in Faroese, and / in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian. In Norwegian / could be substituted for / which is the same sound/letter and is widely understood).

Windows includes an Irish layout which supports acute accents with AltGr for the Irish language and grave accents with the ` dead key for Scottish Gaelic. The other Insular Celtic languages have their own layout. The UK or UK-Extended layout is also frequently used.

Although rarely used, a keyboard layout specifically designed for the Latvian language called ŪGJRMV exists. The Latvian QWERTY keyboard layout is most commonly used; its layout is the same as the United States one, but with a dead key, which allows entering special characters (āčēģīķļņōŗšūž). The most common dead key is the apostrophe ('), which is followed by Alt+Gr (Windows default for Latvian layout). Some prefer using the tick (`).

Where in standard QWERTY the number row is located, you find in Lithuanian QWERTY: Ą, Č, Ę, Ė, Į, Š, Ų, Ū, Ž, instead of their counterparts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, =. If you still want to use the numbers of the mentioned 'number row', you can create them in combination with the AltGr-key. Aside from these changes the keyboard is standard QWERTY. Besides QWERTY, the ĄŽERTY layout without the adjustment of the number row is used.

There is also an alternative keyboard layout called Norwegian with Smi, which allows for easier input of the characters required to write various Smi languages. All the Smi characters are accessed through the AltGr key.

Most typewriters use a QWERTZ keyboard with Polish letters (with diacritical marks) accessed directly (officially approved as "Typist's keyboard", Polish: klawiatura maszynistki, Polish Standard PN-87), which is mainly ignored in Poland as impractical (custom-made keyboards, e.g., those in the public sector as well as some Apple computers, present an exception to this paradigm); the "Polish programmer's" (Polish: polski programisty) layout has become the de facto standard, used on virtually all computers sold on the Polish market.

In Linux-based systems, the euro symbol is typically mapped to Alt+5 instead of Alt+U, the tilde acts as a normal key, and several accented letters from other European languages are accessible through combinations with left Alt. Polish letters are also accessible by using the compose key.

Software keyboards on touchscreen devices usually make the Polish diacritics available as one of the alternatives which show up after long-pressing the corresponding Latin letter.[23][24] However, modern predictive text and autocorrection algorithms largely mitigate the need to type them directly on such devices.

There is also another expanded Polish keyboard layout since 2021, based on the layout from Polish 80s computers Mazovia and wide expanded into all Latin diacritical signs, Greek signs, mathematical signs, IPA signs, typographical signs, symbols and sign "zł" meaning Polish currency, available in two versions, QWERTZ and QWERTY.[25][26][27]

Variant 2 of the Brazilian keyboard, the only which gained general acceptance (MS Windows treats both variants as the same layout),[29] has a unique mechanical layout, combining some features of the ISO 9995-3 and the JIS keyboards in order to fit 12 keys between the left and right Shift (compared to the American standard of 10 and the international of 11). Its modern, IBM PS/2-based variations, are thus known as 107-keys keyboards, and the original PS/2 variation was 104-key. Variant 1, never widely adopted, was based on the ISO 9995-2 keyboards. To make this layout usable with keyboards with only 11 keys in the last row, the rightmost key (/?) has its functions replicated across the AltGr+Q, AltGr+W, and AltGr+E combinations.

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