Romanian keyboard layout

Main articles: Romanian alphabet and Romanian language
See also: QWERTZ and Keyboard layout
Romanian letters à and  on the keyboard of an Apple MacBook Pro
Romanian SR 13392:2004 ("primary") keyboard layout
The original MS Windows' Romanian keyboard. It actually had the cedilla characters and lacked the Euro sign, and in some versions, the dead keys were not implemented, as upon they were typed, they were actually simple diacritic characters.

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 Linux distributions.

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

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

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]

  1. ^ Cristian Secară. "RO Keyboard" (in Romanian). Retrieved 19 January 2013.