Keyboard Layouts for Windows (RUFIN series)

The idea of making my own keyboard layout was born from the simple demand. We have Finnish keyboard layout here in Finland. It contains umlaut letters ä,ö,å. If you want to type in Russian (Cyrillic) using the same keyboard, there are two choices. The first one is obvious - you can simply put on your keyboard buttons additional hats (labels) to get a standard Russian layout (Microsoft Windows has two Russian layouts built-in). This is preferred way if you are doing a lot of Russian typing. The second solution is suited better for those using Russian occasionally, for instance putting an address on envelope or/and writing a small message to your friend. In this case you are normally using standard Finnish layout (Latin, includes all English letters as well). For Cyrillic, you are using nearly phonetic layout adapted to the keyboard base language (in this case Finnish). Switching between the layouts happens as usually with MS Windows built-in keyboard input locale switch with the selected language indicator visible on taskbar. The reason for using a phonetic layout is simple: you do not have to put distracting extra on you keyboard. The word nearly means that the rest of Russian letters are mapped rather subjectively  according to a visual interpretation of buttons' labels on the base keyboard. To help remembering I'm using the following analogies:

• Finnish umlauts are mapped to their nearest equivalents: ä  to 'ya', ö to 'ë' ('yozshik')
• Russian letter 'tche' means a part ('tchast'), i.e 1/2(§)
• Russian letter 'sh' is visually much alike w, thus its tailed neighbor 'shcha' may be placed near (tailed Q)
• Russian letter 'zshe' is starting alike x
• Russian reversed letter 'e' has a "tongue" in the middle that looks like ~ (tilde)
• Russian soft sign has vertical handle (as the apostrophe on keyboard) w/out a side tail
• Russian hard sign has a side tail which can be imagined as sloped vs. vertical in soft sign (accent)
• Swedish å is alike Russian 'yeru' in complexity and "visual weight"

    You can setup your very own layout for MS Windows 95/98 - bright applause to Janko Stamenović. His very nice program called Janko's Keyboard Generator will do this and even little more with ease. The rest of the stuff here intended for those who want to try my own Russian phonetic layouts adapted to Finnish. You can get my old layouts for Windows 9x and Windows NT4, as well as the latest RUFIN (A) Series layout for Windows 2000 (aka NT5) here. The pictures below explain what I'm talking above.

	Standard Finnish Layout for Windows 2000
	FI
	Russian for Finnish RUFIN A Series Layout for Windows 2000
	RU