For other French keyboard layouts, see AZERTY. A simplified Canadian French keyboard layout. A fully standard keyboard has significantly more symbols. [27] The following sections give general descriptions of QWERTY keyboard variants along with details specific to certain operating systems. The emphasis is on Microsoft Windows. The cedilla-versions of the characters do not exist in the Romanian language (they came to be used due to a historic bug). [40] The UCS now says that encoding this was a mistake because it messed up Romanian data and the letters with cedilla and the letters with comma are the same letter with a different style. [41] The AltGr and letter method used for acutes and cedillas does not work for applications which assign shortcut menu functions to these key combinations. Also, on MS Windows, the tilde character "~" ( ⇧ Shift+ `) acts as a dead key to type Polish letters (with diacritical marks) thus, to obtain an "Ł", one may press ⇧ Shift+ ` L. The tilde character is obtained with ⇧ Shift+ ` Space.

Alternating hands while typing is a desirable trait in a keyboard design. While one hand types a letter, the other hand can prepare to type the next letter, making the process faster and more efficient. In the QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only the left hand than the right hand. In fact, thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand [10] (the three most frequent letters in the English language, E T A, are all typed with the left hand). In addition, more typing strokes are done with the left hand in the QWERTY layout. This is helpful for left- handed people but disadvantageous for right-handed people.Newer Apple "British" keyboards use a layout that is relatively unlike either the US or traditional UK keyboard. It uses an elongated return key, a shortened left ⇧ Shift with ` and ~ in the newly created position, and in the upper left of the keyboard are § and ± instead of the traditional EBCDIC codes. The middle-row key that fits inside the return key has \ and Pipe symbol.

The B00 key (left of Z), shifted, results in vertical bar | on some systems (e.g. Windows UK/Ireland keyboard layout and Linux/ X11 UK/Ireland keyboard layout), rather than the broken bar ¦ assigned by BS 4822 and provided in some systems (e.g. IBM OS/2 UK166 keyboard layout) On most keyboards, € is marked as Alt Gr + E and not Alt Gr + 5 as shown in the image. However, in some keyboards, € is found marked twice. An alternative version exists, supporting all of ISO 8859-1. [25]Windows Vista and newer versions include the correct diacritical signs in the default Romanian Keyboard layout. and Ö/ö. (Æ/æ also occurs in Norwegian, Danish and Faroese, Ð/ð in Faroese, and Ö/ö in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian. In Norwegian Ö/ö could be substituted for Ø/Ø which is the same sound/letter and is widely understood).

The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below: [1] - 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z The central characteristics of the Swedish keyboard are the three additional letters Å/å, Ä/ä, and Ö/ö. The same visual layout is also in use in Finland and Estonia, as the letters Ä/ä and Ö/ö are shared with the Swedish language, and even Å/å is needed by Swedish-speaking Finns. However, the Finnish multilingual keyboard adds new letters and punctuation to the functional layout. The QWERTY layout depicted in Sholes's 1878 patent is slightly different from the modern layout, most notably in the absence of the numerals 0 and 1, with each of the remaining numerals shifted one position to the left of their modern counterparts. The letter M is located at the end of the third row to the right of the letter L rather than on the fourth row to the right of the N, the letters X and C are reversed, and most punctuation marks are in different positions or are missing entirely. [6] 0 and 1 were omitted to simplify the design and reduce the manufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. Typists who learned on these machines learned the habit of using the uppercase letter I (or lowercase letter L) for the digit one, and the uppercase O for the zero. [7] acute accents (e.g. á) needed for Irish are generated by pressing the AltGr key together with the letter (or AltGr+ '– acting as a dead key combination– followed by the letter). Thus AltGr+ a produces á; AltGr+ ⇧ Shift+ a produces Á. (Some programs use the combination of AltGr and a letter for other functions, in which case the AltGr+ ' method must be used to generate acute accents). The E00 key (left of 1) with AltGr provides either vertical bar | ( OS/2's UK166 keyboard layout, Linux/ X11 UK keyboard layout) or broken bar ¦ ( Microsoft Windows UK/Ireland keyboard layout)

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It has been suggested that this section be split out into another article. ( Discuss) (October 2021)