Ukrainian Phonetic Keyboard for Windows XP

rev. 17 Dec 2004, 26 Feb 2018

Introduction

Windows XP, as distributed in the United States, has multi-language support built in and enabled. In addition, many of the standard fonts that are accessible from MS Word and other applications – Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New, and Verdana, for example – already support the typing and display of Ukrainian Cyrillic characters.

To type in Ukrainian from your existing physical keyboard, a small piece of system software called a Ukrainian keyboard driver needs to be installed. Fortunately, Windows XP comes with a pre-installed keyboard driver created by Microsoft. Unfortunately, however, that driver is based on the layout of a Ukrainian typewriter keyboard, which makes it difficult for those of us who grew up with the standard English QWERTY keyboard to learn and memorize a second keyboard layout.

A better approach for many of us is a phonetic keyboard layout that maps an existing key to its phonetically or orthographically closest corresponding letter in Ukrainian. For example, the Ukrainian letter Ф is produced by the F key, and so on.

We have used Microsoft’s own supported Keyboard Layout Creator program in Windows XP to produce such a keyboard driver, called Ukrainian Phonetic Keyboard 2.

Ukrainian Phonetic Keyboard 2

+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---------+

| “  | !  | :  | №  | ;  | %  | V  | ’  | ?  | (  | )  | —  | Є  |         |

| „  |   1|   2|   3|   4|   5|   6|   7|   8|   9|   0| -  | є =|  Bksp   |

+----+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+-------+

|  Tab |Ч   |Ш   |Е   |Р   |Т   |И   |У   |І   |О   |П   |Я   |Ї   |Ю      |

| Tab  |ч Q|ш W|е E|р R|т T|и Y|у U|і I|о O|п P|я [|ї ]|ю \ |

+------+----+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+-------+

|  Caps   |А   |С   |Д   |Ф   |Ґ   |Г   |Й   |К   |Л   |Ж   |Щ   |         |

|  Lock   |а A|с S|д D|ф F|ґ G|г H|й J|к K|л L|ж ;|щ '|  Enter  |

+---------+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+---------+

|           |З   |Х   |Ц   |В   |Б   |Н   |М   |«   |»   |Ь   |            |

|   Shift   |з Z|х X|ц C|в V|б B|н N|м M|, ,|. .|ь /|   Shift    |

+-----------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+------------+

In this layout, the vowels Є Я Ї Ю are grouped at the top right of the keyboard and the consonants Ж Щ Ь at the bottom right. All the commonly used punctuation and special characters, except for comma and period, appear in the top row of keys in their Shift state.

Printed Ukrainian often requires special quotation marks. These also appear on this keyboard:
  the special opening and closing „quotation marks“ on the topmost left key,
  the other common set of opening and closing «quotation marks» as the shifted comma and period keys,
  and the — em-dash character as the shifted hyphen key.

In addition, the top row contains the № character for prefixing a number and a capital V for typing the April-to-August portion of a date as a Roman numeral.

Using the Ukrainian Phonetic Keyboard

When the keyboard is installed and enabled as recommended in the section below, a language icon appears on your Windows Task Bar near the System Tray. The icon displays EN when your keyboard is in English, or UK when your keyboard is in Ukrainian.

The quickest way to toggle between the two keyboards is to hold down the left Alt key and push the Shift key. Another way is to left-click the language icon in the Task Bar and then to click on the desired language mode in the list that pops up.

The special characters  `  ~  @  $  ^  &  *  _  +  =  {  }  |  [  ]  \  ”  <  >  /  do not appear on this Ukrainian keyboard. If you need to type any of them, either temporarily toggle over to the English keyboard, or remain in the Ukrainian keyboard and access them from their English-keyboard locations by holding down the Ctrl and Alt keys when you hit the desired unshifted or shifted key.

Installing the Ukrainian Phonetic Keyboard

[This procedure has been demonstrated to work on Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition in their most-recent releases. It is not expected or guaranteed to work with any other flavor or release of Windows.]

Note: Before you install, we strongly recommend that you go to Start / Control Panel / Folder Options, click the View tab, and uncheck “Hide extensions for known file types”. This will make visible the extensions of all the filenames in the procedure below.

1. Download the installation and driver files.

Download the small file KBDURPH2.zip and open it to unZip it into a folder on your Windows desktop or elsewhere. (If you need zipping software, you can download a free-trial version from http://www.winzip.com/). If you’ve instead received these files on a CD, copy the entire CD into a folder.

2. Install the Ukrainian keyboard driver

Go to that folder and double-click on the file KBDURPH2.msi. This launches a Microsoft Installer program that installs the Ukrainian Phonetic Keyboard driver (which is located in the i386 folder and called KBDURPH2.dll) into the system file directory and makes its existence known to Windows XP. (You can at some point in the future launch this same program to remove or replace this keyboard driver with a newer version if you so choose).

3. Make the Ukrainian phonetic keyboard accessible

· Click Start, then Settings (if visible), then Control Panel.

· Double-click Regional and Language Settings.

· Click the Languages tab.

· Click the Details… button.

· If Ukrainian does not already appear, click the Add… button.

· From the Input Language pull-down list, select Ukrainian.

· From the Keyboard Layout pull-down list, select Ukrainian Phonetic Keyboard 2 (do not select Ukrainian from this list since that will install Microsoft’s default Ukrainian typewriter-like keyboard).

· Click the OK button.

· The Ukrainian phonetic keyboard should now appear in the Text Services and Input Languages window.

· Click the Apply button.

· Now click the Language Bar… button

· Make sure that Show the Language Bar on the Desktop is checked.

· Click the OK button.

· Click the OK buttons until all of the Control Panel windows have been closed.

That’s it. You are now ready to create documents and send emails in Ukrainian.

Warning: This is not a supported product, and no warranty is expressed or implied. You use it at your own risk, and your own installation and configuration procedure may differ from that described here.

Sending Ukrainian Email Using Microsoft Outlook Express

In order to make your outgoing Ukrainian emails from Outlook Express easily readable in your recipient’s email reader without his having to type special commands, you should set your message encoding to Cyrillic.

To do this for individual messages, when you are creating a message in the New Message window go to the Format menu and select Encoding and then Cyrillic(Windows).

To enable this feature for all your outgoing messages, from your main menu bar go to the

Tools menu and then select

Options...

Send tab

International Settings... button

select Cyrillic Windows from the drop-down list as the default encoding.

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