The Gate2Home site “enables you to write in your language wherever you are in the world, with an online onscreen keyboard emulator”:
The need for this site arose due to the lack of possibility to change the keyboard language at internet places around the world. These places usually allow you to view sites in your language due to IE language encoding, but don’t allow you to type in your language (because of administrator or system limitations). Furthermore, even if you can change the language, you’ll probably find yourself in front of a keyboard with a different language layout, and you’ll have to guess the position of the keys.
However, this site solves those problems by allowing you to type in your language, and to view your language’s keyboard layout on-screen in a virtual Semi-Real keyboard. It also allows you to simply type in a different language without messing with the operating system settings.
The languages included are: Albanian (Shqip) / Arabic (العربية) / Armenian (հայերեն) / Azeri (Azərbaycan) / Belarusian (Беларуская) / Bengali (বাংলা) / Bulgarian (Български) / Chinese (中文) / Croatian (hrvatski) / Czech (Česky) / Danish (dansk) / Devanagari (देवनागरी) / Divehi (ދިވެހި) / Dutch (Nederlands) / English (English) / Estonian (eesti) / Faeroese ( Føroyskt) / Farsi Persian (فارسی) / Finnish (suomi) / French (Français) / Gaelic (Gàidhlig/Gaeilge) / Georgian ( ქართული) / German (Deutsch) / Greek (Ελληνικά) / Gujarati (ગુજરાતી) / Hebrew (עברית) / Hindi (हिन्दी) / Hungarian (magyar) / Icelandic ( Íslenska) / Irish (Gaeilge) / Italian (italiano) / Japanese (日本語) / Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ) / Kazakh (Қазақ) / Korean (한국어) / Kyrgyz (Кыргыз) / Latvian (Latviešu) / Lithuanian ( Lietuvių) / Macedonian (Македонски) / Malayalam (മലയാളം) / Maltese (Malti) / Maori (Māori) / Marathi (मराठी) / Mongolian (Монгол) / Multilingual / Norwegian (Norsk) / Polish (Polski) / Portuguese (Português) / Punjabi (ਪਜਾਬੀ/पंजाबी) / Romanian (Română) / Russian (Русский) / Serbian (Српски) / Slovak (Slovenčina) / Slovenian (Slovenščina) / Spanish (español) / Swedish (svenska) / Syriac / Tamil (தமிழ்) / Tatar (Tatarça) / Telugu (తెలుగు) / Thai (ไทย) / Turkish (Türkçe) / Ukrainian (Українська) / Urdu (اردو) / Uzbek (Ўзбек) / Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt). All I can say is, this is truly wonderful. (Via MetaFilter.)
That is so incredibly cool!
you know, I look at that list and all I can think is that you have that many alphabets on your computer?
very cool. This will be useful
I may have missed something, but it looks like the Chinese and Japanese keyboards don’t provide for conversion into characters, which makes them useless for any practical applications I can think of. Ironic, since the site does use the inaccessible characters in its menu listings of those languages. Otherwise, yes, a wonderful and cool idea.
what an absolutely cool webtool!! Thanks for the pointer!
Am I the only person having trouble with diacritics?
They don’t work at all for me using Firefox and writing Greek, Spanish or Portuguese.
The diacritics do work however with Spanish and Portuguese using Internet Explorer, although Greek still has problems.
I tried the Polish, but it’s an old-style keyboard that IME hardly anyone uses anymore (for example y and z are reversed).
And it doesn’t handle the windows keyboard that most people do use (diacritics = right altgr + letter).
I tried Vietnamese and I didn’t recognize the set up and can’t figure out how the tones are added (if they are). I use telex (a Vietnamese method that depends on rapid conversion of multiple keystrokes so that I type dduwowcj (or dduwowjc) to get được.
Wonderful idea but it needs more up to date keyboards.
[…]While i have been surfing on LanguageHat, I have seen a post which is about language keyboard that enables you to write in many languages with an online onscreen keyboard.[…]
[…]While i have been surfing on LanguageHat, I have seen a post which is about language keyboard that enables you to write in many languages with an online onscreen keyboard.[…]
If on Windows, can’t you just use Character Map?
I’ve developed much more powerful keyboard:
– pure javascript and CSS
– easy layouts creation (currently about 35 languages and 40 layouts supported)
– standalone JS package, that could be connected to any page with the couple of lines of code.
Demo:
http://debugger.ru/demo/projects/virtualkeyboard
Article:
http://codeproject.com/jscript/jsvk.asp
If on Windows, can’t you just use Character Map?
Sure, but that’s not a keyboard. You have to double-click on every character you want to insert (or click on it and then click “choose”). I’ve written Russian e-mails that way — it works, but it requires lots of patience.
There is so,ething strqnge hozever. I qlreqdy hqve q French “QWERTY” [read “AZERTY”] keyboqrd; qnd zhen I select “French” qnd I stqrt typing; it produces so,e funny results… Zhqt shqll I do. [question mark]