Portuguese Language/Orthography

This thing is a regular keyboard layout, except that with Alt key on Mac or Alt Gr key on Windows it lets you type all these nice characters seamlessly.

Just type Alt+T, and you get a ™. Everyday things are apostrophe (Alt + '), quotes (Alt + < >), em-dash (Alt + -) and en-dash (Alt + Shift + -). Other stuff is intended to be not so hard to remember if you use it. For example, Alt+v is for ↓, since the letter ‘v’ looks somewhat like arrow pointing down. Alt+A is ≈ for approximately, Alt+S is § for section. Guess why Alt+8 is ∞ and Alt+R is ®. Alt+Shift+A is ⌘. So, you get the idea.

The layout also supports many kinds of diacritics, so you can type words like naïve or café and have fun. On the picture above (see full image for Mac or full image for Windows) the diacritical keys are printed on a beige background, e.g. acute is on / and diaeresis is on :.

To type character é, you first press Alt + Shift + / (this kind of means “enter acute mode”), then press e. To type ï, press Alt + Shift + :, then press i. Not every character has a version with every possible accent. For example, there is no letter v with circumflex. In case you want to use such a character, you need to use combining diacritics. Press v and then Alt + Shift + ^ twice. You can hold Alt + Shift and double press ^.

The best way to understand how it works is to play with it. But please note that many applications do not support combining diacritics, so whether you can use them or not is more or less question of your luck :-)