About TypeIt.org

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 unintuitive keyboard "shortcuts" such as Alt+0128
  • go letter-hunting with the Character Map in Windows or Word
  • install Windows keyboard layouts which have the nasty side effect of interfering with your ability to type normal letters
  • 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 (Ctrl+Letter) that don't require you to grow additional fingers and don't block normal letters.

Supported browsers

The following browsers are supported in full (i.e. buttons and keyboard shortcuts):

  • On Windows: Mozilla Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 7/8. Internet Explorer 6 also works, but there are minor issues.
  • On MacOS: Mozilla Firefox 3, Safari 3/4
  • On Linux: Mozilla Firefox 3

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

Acknowledgments

TypeIt uses the JavaScript implementation of SHA-1 by Chris Veness. When developing the current version of 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), Dav Glass (Safari quirks), Diego Perini (IE quirks).

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 and lets them ask and answer questions on languages and language learning. I am a part-time English-Polish translator, offering Polish translation services online. 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:

tszynalski at type it dot org