Romanian keyboard layout

Romanian letters  and à on the keyboard of an Apple MacBook Pro

Romanian SR 13392:2004 ("primary") keyboard layout

The current Romanian National Standard SR 13392:2004 establishes two layouts for Romanian keyboards: a "primary" one and a "secondary" one.

The “primary” layout is intended for more traditional users that learned long ago how to type with older, Microsoft-style implementations of the Romanian keyboard. The “secondary” layout is mainly used by programmers and it does not contradict the physical arrangement of keys on a US-style keyboard. The “secondary” arrangement is used as the default one by the majority of GNU/Linux distributions.

There are four Romanian-specific characters that are incorrectly implemented in all Microsoft Windows versions before Vista:

• U+0218 Ș S WITH COMMA BELOW – incorrectly implemented as U+015E Ş S WITH CEDILLA BELOW
• U+0219 ș S WITH COMMA BELOW – incorrectly implemented as U+015F ş S WITH CEDILLA BELOW
• U+021A Ț T WITH COMMA BELOW – incorrectly implemented as U+0162 Ţ T WITH CEDILLA BELOW
• U+021B ț T WITH COMMA BELOW – incorrectly implemented as U+0163 ţ T WITH CEDILLA BELOW

Since Romanian hardware keyboards are not widely available, Cristian Secară has created a driver that allows the Romanian characters to be generated with a US-style keyboard, in all Windows versions previous to Vista. It uses the right AltGr key modifier to generate the characters.^[1]

An alternative, more ergonomic (though non-standard) keyboard layout, with a user choice between cedillas and commas, is proposed and implemented for the Microsoft Windows operating system by the Ergo Romanian project. They suggest altering keys on the standard QWERTY layout which are less frequent in Romanian, namely q, w, y, k, x, to produce Romanian characters ă, ș, ț, î, â, respectively.^[2]

QWERTZ keyboard (former)

Former Romanian (QWERTZ) keyboard.

Before Windows Vista, this keyboard was used. The comma from S and T is replaced by the cedilla (in some fonts the T-cedilla character is rendered as T-comma, as in some Adobe fonts). In 2012, a new keyboard was introduced. This keyboard was built after the same QWERTZ model, but instead of S-cedilla and T-cedilla are S-comma and T-comma.^[3]

References

1. Cristian Secară. "RO Keyboard" (in Romanian). Retrieved 19 January 2013.
2. Anasoftware. "Ergo Romanian". Retrieved 6 January 2009.
3. Cristian Adam. "The Română (Moștenit) keyboard" (in Romanian). Retrieved 27 November 2012.