How to type Czech characters on Windows 7 using CS language with US International Keyboard input mode

Question

I am running Windows 7.

I have an Italian keyboard which I keep configured as a US keyboard (I know the positions of characters on my keyboard by heart and use it as though it were a US keyboard without any problems).

I now want to type Czech characters, without having to use ALT+XXXX codes to insert text (these aren't working for me anyways). I do not have a compose key. As this page shows, on Linux the problem is solved nicely:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

but I want a solution for Windows 7 to easily type characters from the LATIN-2 character set.

I can shift between the EN and CS input methods with SHIFT+ALT but that's all.

Please help.

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Find below an image of a Czech Programmers' Keyboard (not found elsewhere on the internet)

This keyboard is just like a standard US QWERTY keyboard but has the extra capability of allowing you to use it as a Czech QZERTY keyboard by alowing you to enter all the Czech characters appearing in red on the image below (hit CTRL + on your web beowser to view keyboard details). With this keyboard configuration just hold Alt Gr to type the character with diacritics corresponding to your US ASCII keyboard key.

Answer 1

The US International keyboard layout isn’t really suitable for input of Czech texts, since it lacks many letters used in Czech. It is “international” in a very relative sense only: it is oriented towards West European languages, covering basically just part of ISO Latin 1.

Using the Czech language keyboard layout (shipped with Windows) is definitely one possibility, but it means that you need to learn and remember rather arbitrary-looking correspondences between keys (or key combinations) and characters.

Personally, I use Finnish modern standard keyboard layout, which lets me type all Latin letters used in European languages in a rather natural way. But this requires a set of keys for diacritic marks, and the Italian keyboard lacks them.

So if I were in your position, I would probably use MSKLC to create a modified version of the Italic keyboard layout that corresponds to the physical keyboard that you are using. Since Czech mostly has just one diacritic mark that can be used for each letter (e.g., “a” can only take the acute accent, and “n” can only take the caron), I would probably use just the AltGr key (right Alt key) to produce them (AltGr A, AltGr N, etc.). This should be very easy to remember.

This would leave a problem with “e” and “u”, which can each take two different diacritic marks. A natural (to me) solution would be to make the Italian keyboard keys “è” and “ù” produce “é” and “ú” (after all, è and ù are not used in Czech) and use AltGr E for “ě” and AltGr U for “ů”.

Answer 2

Use charmap.exe to get the character you want and copy/paste it into your document.