The German Extended E1 keyboard layout

[schnee]

Windows 11 recently gained two German extended keyboard layouts: German extended E1, and German extended E2. The difference to the regular German keyboard layout is that in the AltGr plane, they add a few characters and a whole bunch of new dead keys,[1] which should be quite useful. Here's a comparison, using the layouts given on the Microsoft

Comments

[mikazo]

It's harder than it should be to type in German on my current laptop. In the past I could use alt codes to type the umlaut letters, but my laptop doesn't have a numeric keypad. My options seem to be to copy and paste the letters I need or switch to the German keyboard layout. But that sucks because I end up having to change layouts just to have access to a few letters, and the German layout swaps the Z and Y keys.

Do you suppose it looks strange to simply bypass the umlaut letters entirely and instead write "ae," "oe," and "ue" instead? For instance, "Gruess dich."

[schnee]

No, that's quite acceptable, and the most that I think people will think is exactly what's true in your case: that you're using a keyboard without those letters but that you're aware of the correct alternate spellings. So yeah, nothing wrong with that.

That said there is a US international keyboard layout that gives easy access to these. Perhaps that's something to look into?

[hastka]

Interesting update.

As to the quotes, I don't know if this is customary or just an ASCII kludge but I've seen people simply use commas and apostrophes for that, and/or some text editors (like outlook mail) I'm pretty sure will auto-"correct" ,, and '' to be those marks. For sure they do that with en and em dashes when typing a hyphen or with ellipsis if typing three periods. For better or worse. >.>