Localiced keyboard

Beginning 1999 Psion netBook was available with a keyboard for Finland, Sweden and Denmark. In the handheld category it was fast and form factor was nice for a mobile writer. The included word processor was good enough, with outliner and find/replace and auto save. System software EPOC32 R5 version included with my device was release 156 SWE. After that Psion ended support for nordic localizations.

Localized keyboard lost

The last system software version to date is release 158 UK, which is needed to get netBook networked with a WLAN card. To get the nice, localized keyboard working after updating was a major pain, as there was no nordic keyboard layout in the OS.

Localized keyboard back

The solution was tinkering with keystroke catching freeware Keyboard Layouter. The substitute chars had to be set by ctrl + (ISO 8859-1 number in decimal), assigning macro keys for toggling layouts and remembering to save.

Swedish/Finnish keyboard layout follows in text format. For other Keyboard Layouter users here is file keyboard.dat included. Macro combination which toggles between UK and Swedish layout is Ctrl + Menu, but macro works occasionally in this beta software. After Psion is reset, Keyboard Layouter must be started, too.

Psion netBook Swedish keyboard layout as typed with the 58 built-in keys (non-printable and whitespace chars excluded):

• 1st row of text typed without modifiers,
• 2nd with shift key down
• 3rd with function key down, when applicable
• 4th comes an empty line, to precede next row of keys

1234567890+
!"#¤%&/()=?
§@£$`´{[]}\

qwertyuiopå
QWERTYUIOPÅ
  €   ¨^~’*

asdfghjklöä
ASDFGHJKLÖÄ


zxcvbnm,.
ZXCVBNM;:

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These old pages are preserved for archiving purposes. My notes I nowadays write to my vihko. Tuomas Rosberg