Ukrainian Phonetic Keyboard for Windows
XP
rev.
Introduction
Windows XP, as distributed in the
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 Ô 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
+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+---------+
| “ | ! |
: | ¹
| ; | % | V |
’ | ?
| ( | ) | — | ª |
|
| „ |
1| 2| 3|
4| 5| 6|
7| 8| 9|
0| - | º =| Bksp |
+----+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+-------+
|
Tab |× |Ø |Å
|Ð |Ò |È
|Ó |² |Î
|Ï |ß |¯
|Þ |
| Tab
|÷ Q|ø W|å E|ð R|ò T|è Y|ó U|³ I|î O|ï P|ÿ [|¿ ]|þ \
|
+------+----+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+-------+
|
Caps |À |Ñ
|Ä |Ô |¥
|Ã |É |Ê
|Ë |Æ |Ù |
|
|
Lock |à
A|ñ
S|ä
D|ô
F|´
G|ã
H|é
J|ê
K|ë
L|æ
;|ù
'| Enter
|
+---------+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+-+--+---------+
| |Ç
|Õ |Ö |Â
|Á |Í |Ì |« |» |Ü |
|
|
Shift |ç
Z|õ
X|ö
C|â
V|á
B|í
N|ì
M|,
,|.
.|ü
/| Shift
|
+-----------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+------------+
In this
layout, the vowels ª ß ¯ Þ are grouped at the top right of the
keyboard and the consonants Æ Ù Ü 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 ¹ 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
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.
Please send
comments or suggestions to
.