About this site

If you have the need to type anything in a foreign language which has accents and other strange-looking characters, and you only have a US keyboard, your life used to be miserable. You used to have to do one of the following:

• ignore the special characters
• memorize unintuitive keyboard "shortcuts" such as Alt+0128
• go letter-hunting with the Character Map in Windows or Word
• install Windows keyboard layouts which have the nasty side effect of interfering with your ability to type normal letters
• buy and install third-party text input software

Now, through the miracles of Unicode and JavaScript, you can just navigate to this site, type whatever you need to type in a text box, and then paste it wherever you need it — into your word processor, e-mail message, etc. You can type foreign characters by clicking a button or by pressing an intuitive keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Letter) that doesn't require you to grow additional fingers and doesn't block normal letters.

System requirements

To use the site, you need Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, or a recent version of Mozilla (Netscape). However, in Mozilla, keyboard shortcuts are disabled, so you will need to use the buttons to type any foreign characters.

Author

My name is Tomasz P. Szynalski. I also made Antimoon — a site which tells people how to learn English effectively. I am an English-Polish translator, offering Polish translation services online. I live in Wroclaw, Poland.

I got the idea of making this site from the Russian keyboard at Apronus.com, a website made by my two friends, Michał Ryszard Wójcik and Michał Stanisław Wójcik (yes, they have the same first and last names). Their site covers a variety of topics, such as language learning, music, mathematics and chess, so if you're serious about any of these topics, you would do well to check it out.

Contact information

Your suggestions are welcome. Please write me at the following address: