Unicode and Keyboards on Windows

This whitepaper, presented at the Twenty-third Internationalization and Unicode Conference, discusses the many features that keyboard layouts support (such as dead keys, shift states and ligatures), the interaction between input, fonts, and rendering engines, the issue of code pages vs. Unicode, when IMEs are preferred and when they are not, and the collation issues that enter into the equation. In the end, it becomes clear that on Windows, the input of virtually any characters in Unicode is possible, even if in some cases more work is required than was originally expected.

Michael S. Kaplan and Cathy Wissink, Windows Globalization, Microsoft Corporation