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 on an x86 platform.)

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.)