ARMENIAN KEYBOARD DRIVERS FOR WINDOWS NT 4.0, 2000, XP AND VISTA

Compunigma has prepared a series of Armenian Keyboard drivers for Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP AND VISTA: two keyboard drivers designed to work in conjunction with Armenian fonts encoded in the ARMSCII standard (the Armenian alphabet occupying the ranges 178-253 of the ASCII character map) and two keyboard drivers designed to work with the Unicode standard, which is starting to appear more and more on the PCs, specially since it is shipped with the latest versions of Windows.

The four keyboard drivers can be downloaded in two packages. They are free of charge.

THE ARMSCII PACKAGE

The two keyboard layouts included in the package are:

Armenian HyeWriter Keyboard (also known as the Olympia (Eastern phonetic) keyboard):

one of the more popular layouts within the Diaspora users, specially amont those with typing/typesetting experience from pre-windows days. It is a combination of phonetic correspondance with the latin characters of standard Western keyboard layouts and the convenience of having certain heavily used characters in the centre of the keyboard regardless of their phonetic correspondance. Derived from the layout used on the Olympia typewriters that were the norm in the Diaspora, its name is a tribute to the first Armenian word processing application, HyeWriter, launched by Bytec in 1982, which used this layout. This is the best layout for someone who alternates frequently between the Latin and Armenian alphabets.

Armenian Standard Keyboard (also known as the Royal or ergonomic keyboard):

colloqually named the mouke (mouse) keyboard, as the word mouke is formed on the middle of the first (top) character line of keys, this is the most popular keyboard in Armenia, where phonetic correspondence with the latin keyboard is not requested by the users. The keyboard is arranged according to the usage rate of the various letters of the Armenian alphabet. This is the best layout for someone who is working in Armenian and has no need to type in another language.



THE UNICODE PACKAGE

The package includes two drivers for the same two layouts: the Armenian HyeWriter Keyboard and the Armenian Standard Keyboard.





LIMITATIONS

These keyboard drivers can not be installed on Windows 95, 98, Me, and NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51



INSTALLATION

Download the ARMSCII keyboard drivers pack by clicking on this link. For the Unicode package's two keyboard drivers click on this link.

Save the file of your choice on your desktop and unzip it. Do not open it from within the download dialog box. A folder named ARMSCIIPACK or UnicodePack should be generated, depending on your choice. The folder contains the drivers, as well as a ReadMe.txt file containing the necessary installation instructions. Just follow the instructions.



Happy typing,

VIKEN APRAHAMIAN

(C) 2007-2009 by Compunigma