About TypeIt

If you have the need to type anything in a foreign language which has accents and other strange-looking characters, and you only have a US keyboard, your life used to be miserable. You used to have to do one of the following:

• ignore the special characters
• memorize cryptic keyboard “shortcuts” such as Alt+0128
• go letter-hunting with the Character Map in Windows or Word
• install OS keyboard layouts which have the nasty side effect of interfering with your ability to type punctuation
• buy and install third-party text input software

Now, through the miracles of Unicode and JavaScript, you can just navigate to this site, type whatever you need to type in a text box, and then paste it wherever you need it – into your word processor, e-mail message, etc. You can type foreign characters by clicking buttons or by pressing intuitive keyboard shortcuts (Alt + letter).

Keyboard shortcuts

TypeIt uses a unique keyboard shortcut system which has two big advantages:

1. It is very respectful of your existing keyboard layout and doesn’t “take over” important keys like punctuation and digits.*
2. It uses really obvious shortcuts. For example, to get an accented letter based on e, just hold Alt* and keep pressing E until you get the letter you want. In the French keyboard, one press will type é, two presses – è, three presses – ê, etc. Because all the variants of e are assigned to a single key, the number of things that you have to memorize to use this system is virtually zero. (Compare this with a system where every accented letter has a separate shortcut and you can never remember which key types which letter.)

The above system works very well for most languages which use the Latin alphabet, such as Spanish, for other scripts based on Latin letters, such as the IPA phonetic script, and even for math symbols. However, there is no typing scheme that is ideal for all languages. For languages which use a large number of diacritics, like Vietnamese, TypeIt provides dedicated shortcuts for each diacritic. For languages which do not use the Latin alphabet at all, like Russian or Greek, TypeIt uses easy-to-learn, “phonetic” keyboard layouts that match Latin letters with similar-sounding letters in the other alphabet.

Financing

It takes time and money to keep this site up and running, and to make sure it is always compatible with the latest browser versions. Financial support for TypeIt comes largely from users like you. If you use TypeIt and would like it to stay online, please consider supporting it with a little money. Thank you!

Supported browsers

TypeIt works best in Google Chrome (Windows, MacOS, Android) and Microsoft Edge (Windows). It works pretty well in Safari (MacOS, iOS) – however, it won’t preserve your text as you switch between different editors. Mozilla Firefox is supported in a limited way – keyboard shortcuts won’t work* and it will not always preserve your text as you switch between editors.

In other browsers, there will likely be problems with keyboard shortcuts and other glitches.

Acknowledgments

When developing TypeIt, I was greatly helped by the research of the following people, who were kind enough to publish their work online: Jan Wolter (keyboard support in browsers), Thomas Frank (temporary storage in JavaScript), Peter-Paul Koch (browser incompatibilities), Alexis Deveria (browser support tables).

I got the idea of making this site from the Russian keyboard made by my two friends, Michał Ryszard Wójcik and Michał Stanisław Wójcik (yes, they have the same first and last names).

Author

My name is Tomasz P. Szynalski. I also made Antimoon – a site which tells people how to learn English effectively (much of the advice applies to other languages), and Online Tone Generator – a popular Web tool that lets you easily generate audio signals of any frequency.

I spend a lot of time thinking about philosophical and practical topics; I publish some of the practical stuff here. I live in Wrocław, Poland.

Contact information

Your suggestions and bug reports are very welcome. If you can send me a short note describing what you use TypeIt for (your work? personal e-mail? school assignments?), that would be great, too. Here’s my e-mail address:

Privacy

Stuff you type. The text you type into TypeIt remains on your computer. It is not sent to any servers nor stored in any database. However, TypeIt automatically saves your text in your browser so that it can be restored if you accidentally navigate to another site, close the tab, or if your browser crashes. This means that people with access to your computer may be able to read the last text you typed. For more information, see “How can I secure my privacy while using TypeIt?”.

Cookies. TypeIt uses its own cookies (and similar technologies) to improve your experience, for example to remember your preferences and to save your text (see above). (In case you didn’t read the paragraph above, your saved text never leaves your computer.) In addition, it uses Google cookies (and similar technologies) to analyze traffic and serve ads. By using this site, you agree to this.

Data sharing. Information about your use of this site (the pages you visited, your IP address, your browser version, etc.) is shared with Google for the purposes of analyzing traffic (Google Analytics) and serving ads. None of the data shared with Google includes your name, address, email address or telephone number. (more information about how Google uses information about your visits)

Personalized ads. In order to show you the most relevant ads, Google tries to figure out what kinds of goods and services you may be interested in. It does so by collecting certain information about you – for example, your geographical location, your Google searches, and your visits to this and other websites. This information does not include your name, address, email address or telephone number. Google will use this information when deciding which ads to show you when you visit this site.