Romanian keyboard layout

The current Romanian National Standard SR 13392:2004 establishes two layouts for Romanian keyboards: a "primary" one and a "secondary" one.

The "primary" layout is intended for more traditional users that learned long ago how to type with older, Microsoft-style implementations of the Romanian keyboard. The "secondary" layout is mainly used by programmers and it does not contradict the physical arrangement of keys on a US-style keyboard. The "secondary" arrangement is used as the default one by the majority of Linux distributions.

There are four Romanian-specific characters that are incorrectly implemented in all Microsoft Windows versions before Vista:

• U+0218 Ș LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW – incorrectly implemented as U+015E Ş LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CEDILLA
• U+0219 ș LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH COMMA BELOW – incorrectly implemented as U+015F ş LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CEDILLA
• U+021A Ț LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH COMMA BELOW – incorrectly implemented as U+0162 Ţ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH CEDILLA
• U+021B ț LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH COMMA BELOW – incorrectly implemented as U+0163 ţ LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH CEDILLA

Since Romanian hardware keyboards are not widely available, Cristian Secară has created a driver that allows the Romanian characters to be generated with a US-style keyboard, in all Windows versions previous to Vista. It uses the right AltGr key modifier to generate the characters.^[1]