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Mediekey provides an extended Canadian French keyboard layout meant to make it easier to enter and edit old books and manuscripts, which often contain characters well beyond English or other contemporary keyboards. Mediekey works on Windows. (You can also install a Canadian French keyboard layout without installing Mediekey if you want some extended characters but don't need to full capabilities or installation challenges of Mediekey.)
Using Mediekey requires Windows and installing the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4 (MKLC). MKLC is aging, and requires some similarly old infrastructure to run: the .NET runtime 2.09, and the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1. You need to install those before you can run MKLC.
- Installing MKLC
- Installing the Mediekey Layout
- Editing layouts in MKLC
- Modifying layout properties with MKLC or a text editor
You can see the current layout as of January 20, 2020, here:
Figure 1 - Mediekey layout without using Shift key. Same as Canadian French except that cedilla applies to more characters.
Figure 2 - Mediekey layout with Shift key depressed. Same as Canadian French except that diacritics on right apply to many more characters.
Figure 3 - Mediekey layout with AltGr (Ctrl-Alt) key depressed. Same as Canadian French except that degree sign, macron, and tilde apply to many more characters, and the cluster of symbols and letters on the left hand side are new.
Figure 4 - Mediekey layout with Shift-AltGr (Ctrl-Alt) key depressed. Same as Canadian French (blank so far!) except that the small cluster of symbols and letters on the left hand side are new.