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Windows Keyboard Layouts & Input Method Editors (IMEs)

You can view here the key mappings of all Keyboard Layouts & Global Input Method Editors (IMEs) available for Microsoft Windows. Keyboard Layouts are used for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, & Korean, for which Global IMEs are used instead.

Windows 2000, XP, & Server 2003 users: keyboard layouts & IMEs can be installed only if their respective Language Supports are installed. To install Language Supports, go to Control Panel\Regional Options\General and check-mark their corresponding language groups under Language settings for the system.
Windows Vista users: all keyboard layouts & IMEs listed below, plus their required language supports, are already installed on Windows Vista. Also note that Windows Vista includes way more layouts than those below, reflecting the new language supports added since Unicode 5.0 was put into effect.

Once you install the required Language Supports, to install a keyboard layout or Global IME, follow the instructions below:

Layouts marked by an * are available only to Windows XP, Server 2003, & Vista (but can be used with Windows 2000 by following this dirty trick). You may need to install the latest Service Pack in order to make some layouts available to use.
Layouts marked by ** are available only to Windows Vista (soon to be listed here).
Layouts marked by a † are available only to Windows XP & Server 2003 but not to Windows Vista.

There is a downloadable utility from Australian-based Tavultesoft called Keyman. This is an alternate keyboard manager that lets you use custom keyboard layouts not developed by Windows but by independent developers from around the world. These layouts can also be downloaded from the Keyman site.

Dirty trick for using Windows XP/Server 2003 layouts on Windows 2000

Windows 2000 does not include the following languages: Bengali, Bosnian, Divehi, Gujarati, Kannada, Kyrgyz, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Mongolian, Punjabi, Quechua, Sami (in its various forms), Syriac, Telugu, & Welsh. Bosnian uses by default the same layout for Croatian/Slovenian, and Quechua uses by default the Latin American layout, but the other ones use by default layouts not found on Windows 2000 (but found on Windows XP & Server 2003). Urdu language is included with Windows 2000, but not its associated layout (which is only found on Windows XP & Server 2003). But here I provide a somewhat dirty trick for enabling such unavailable layouts on Windows 2000:

  1. Locate a computer with Windows XP or Server 2003 with support installed for all languages.
  2. Search for the required DLLs within the computer’s WINDOWS\system32 subfolder and copy them to a removable drive (CD-RW, USB flash drive, SD memory card, etc.). The layouts associated with these DLLs are not required to be installed; only their DLLs must be present.
  3. At the Start menu, go to Run… and type regedit. This will open the Registry Editor.
  4. Browse to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout & HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts subkeys within My Computer and export them to your removable drive as .REG files. The last subkey includes subkeys that correspond to all the keyboard layouts for which their DLLs are already installed, even though they are not installed.
  5. Now go to your Windows 2000 computer.
  6. Copy the DLLs to your WINNT\system32 subfolder, double-click the REGs, and restart your computer.
  7. Now follow the usual procedure for installing a keyboard layout. The new languages will not appear, though, but the new layouts can be selected for already-existing languages. (For example, you can select Norwegian (Nynorsk) as the language to be installed and select Norwegian with Sami as the layout instead of the default Norwegian layout.)

Run by: Leroy Vargas. For feedback related to charsets or this website, Leroy can be contacted through his Lycos address.