Latin ISO Keyboard

In this prior post I discussed my recent transition from Mac back to Windows and the adventures to have a workable Russian phonetic keyboard to type on my default EN-US physical keyboard.

For speakers of latin languages, Mac’s Spanish ISO keyboard layout is also fantastic because allows to write in Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian (and for sure many others that scape my limited knowledge) without the need to ever switch layouts.

Windows’ built in Spanish keyboard layout is almost as good:

• Italian is the base case: “Il gallo giallo”
• You certainly can type in Spanish with the ; and ‘ keys: “El niño saltó”
• Then type Catalan adding the [ and SHIFT+] combos: “Esperança àcida”
• After than, the addition of SHIFT+[ allows to write French: “L’hôpital”
• But when you try to type the Portuguese ã and õ: “O meu avõ João”…

… the ALTGR+; override that exists in Mac isn’t there! What is going on?

The Misplaced Override

Actually, doing some investigation via the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, that override is still in the keyboard, but for some reason it is assigned to the letter 4 instead of the symbol ;

That seems quite absurd to me. It is not only that “I am used to Mac’s way”, it is the fact that “4” is a relatively hard to access key in the periphery, while “;” is more accessible and, additionally, is the default position for the Spanish letter ñ that share the familiar tilde with ã and õ.

Original Spanish Keyboard Configuration

My Own Take

The Keyboard Layout Creator allows us to fix this issue, and in this case it is much easier than with the Russian layout since we just need to copy the so-called Dead Key assignments present in letter 4 (a Dead Key is essentially a modifier, a key that doesn’t produce a symbol by itself but modifies the following keypress).

The mappings for the tilde dead key, in text, are as follows:

U+006e | U+00f1 | n |ñ
U+0061 | U+00e3 | a |ã
U+006f | U+00f5 | o | õ
U+004e | U+00d1 | N | Ñ
U+0041 | U+00c3 | A | Ã
U+004f | U+00d5 | O | Õ
U+0020 | U+007e | | ~

Dead Key Configuration

Result

I managed to fix that and additionally moved the < and > symbols as ALTGR+, and ALTGR+ overrides (mimicking their position on the EN-US layout) rather than in the VK_OEM_102 key (on the right side of the left SHIFT) that doesn’t exist in the physical US keyboards.

For speakers of other European languages, nothing prevents you from mapping other characters in the Unicode Character List as you like.

In any case, here is the end result. It does the job extremely well. I called it the “SpISO” keyboard. You can download it from the following link:

Download

The layout of the keys is exactly as you would expect in Mac:

Target Spanish Keyboard Configuration

Fixing the Keyboard Layout Bar

Last but not least a piece of advice. Windows is far from perfect and sometimes a language will seem impossible to remove from the Keyboard Layout Bar, stuck at the end of it.

In those cases you can directly REGEDIT …
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout\Preload
… and remove the offending language (or the entire list, you can later add them again as usual).