Windows keyboard layout adds double quotes and em dash

The attachment to this article is a variation of the Microsoft Windows US-International keyboard layout that adds key sequences for the left double quote (“), right double quote (”) and em dash (—) characters.

This Microsoft widget demonstrates the standard US-International layout. Hover your mouse over and/or click the Shift/AltGr keys in the image to see the corresponding key/character mappings.

To install, unpack the attached ZIP archive into a directory and run setup.exe. This installation should work with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 7 on x86, x64, and IA64 platforms. (I have only verified this with Windows Vista and Windows 7 on x86 platforms.)

This all presumes that you know how to install alternate keyboard layouts, but if you don’t and there’s enough interest (leave a comment below), I’ll write up a full description of installation and the use of alternate keyboard layouts. In the meantime, here’s the Microsoft article on using the US-International layout: “How to use the United States-International keyboard layout in Windows 7, in Windows Vista, and in Windows XP” (MSKB Article 306560)

(If you’d like to create your own custom keyboard layout, I created this one using the free Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator.)