Romanian keyboards

This is a public service announcement for the Romanians in the audience.

Romanian needs 5 letters outside the Latin alphabet (ă, â, ş, ţ, î). In the dark ages of computers, we would just substitute the Latin/ASCII letter for the Romanian letter, sometimes with comic effects (consider tata=father vs. ţâţă=breast :P ). Fortunately, Unicode has been the Internet reality for quite a few years, so we should now spell correctly.

But how can we generate the Romanian letters easily? Romanian keyboards are terrible in my opinion, because they banish these highly used letters to the edge of the keyboard. The alternative I have found is a little bit of freeware called ER1. This keyboard layout replaces unused Latin letters, which are very conveniently located on the keyboard, with the Romanian letters (e.g. q-->ă, w-->ş etc). I found I was able to type at high speed in a matter of minutes.

In Windows, you can change between keyboard layouts with LeftAlt+LeftShift, so switching between English and Romanian text is extremely easy.