KONYIN Keyboard Conquers Character Coding

Multilingual Keyboard Saves Many Keystrokes

NATICK, MA - Now, I wish I had a keyboard that would let me easily enter the name of the man I met today.

I had already seen his company's products, but I only gave them passing notice since they appeared to be just some other style of keyboards.

"Walter" explained that he and his partner, Ade Oyegbola, who share the roles of Co-President and CEO of their company LANCOR Technologies, hope to market their keyboards to the expanding base of multi-lingual computer users here in the U.S.

Walter's name looks like Olukayode Walter Oluwole in English, but contains at least seven letters that don't appear in the standard English 26 letter alphabet.

The letters almost look the same, but they have small marks above or below or through them. Many people describe the characters as "..u with a two little dots above it" or, maybe "..a with a little accent mark".

Used in printing, computer programing, desktop publishing and other typography based industries these are called diacritic marks, or simply "diacritics".

After a few minutes of talking shop, (programming, character encoding, diacritics, unicode)... the weather, etc, we discussed the keyboards.

Walter told me how the KONYIN series of keyboards have four [SHIFT] keys. The extra shift keys let you form characters by selecting a base letter, a shift mode and a diacritic mark.

To enter these types of characters in word processors or other programs, people ordinarily look at a list of special characters, and enter an extended character code value, e.g. -

ü or &umlat; to get the ü character.

Normal keyboards do not provide an easy way to enter them. Here's what you have to do to make the small "u" with the two dots above:

1. Make sure [NUM LOCK] is on
2. Hold down the [ALT] key
3. On number pad, enter: 0252
4. release the [ALT] key

...a small ü should appear.

With the KONYIN 106 key keyboards, you simply hold down one of the extra [SHIFT] keys and the letter [U] and tap the key with the diacritic for the two dots.

Walter told me the keyboard line, named after his son, (KONYIN), will become more useful under the Microsoft Vista operating system which will provide native support for Unicode 4.

Unicode is an extended character set that contain most of the characters used in most of the common languages of the world.

Major software applications are starting to allow Unicode 4 characters to be directly input into text editting areas and data fields. The keyboard will make it simple for people to take advantage of these new features.


You can find more about the world's first truly multi-lingual keyboard at www.KONYIN.com.

To purchase a Konyin keyboard visit www.PCExchange.net they carry several models including a wireless version.

*For more info on Unicode, see: http://www.unicode.org/


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