How Russian-Tatar united layout was made

Characters from the English layout

When creating this layout, first of all I took the standard Russian layout and added special characters from the English layout to it, since in modern communication and work we often use symbols like at or hashtag. Email addresses, Markdown, Regexp, tags in social networks — for all this, and for much more, you need characters that are present in the English layout, but missing in Russian. Just take the standard English layout, which is drawn on the average keyboard, and add its special characters (only those that are not already presented) as a third layer characters on the same buttons they are located in the English layout.

ru + en typography

Typographic symbols

Next is typography used in Cyrillic languages. Russian keyboard layout has historically had a rather strange situation: the classic Russian keyboard layout does not contain guillemots, as well as proper quotation marks that are used in Russian language. At the same time Russian layout has double quotation mark, which is not used in Russian. There are also some other symbols missing that are necessary for proper writing in Russian. The same symbols are needed for other languages whose alphabet is based on Cyrillic (including Tatar). We need to fix this.

We could just take the Birman's layout — everything is there, but it seems redundant to me. Our goal is to place Tatar symbols on top of Russian letters later, so we want to leave the letter block as blank as possible. To the required minimum, I included two types of quotation marks, non-breaking spaces (including zero width), em dash, en dash, an apostrophe, a paragraph mark, a list marker, an accent and an ellipsis. Both the list of these symbols and their location may be debatable, but I am open to discussion.

Now let's add these symbols to our layout. The angle brackets had to be moved from their place, because for the Russian language quotes are much more important, and this place is very convenient. Then we also move the single quotation mark just to free up the letter. In addition, it would be quite logical for a single quote to be next to a double quote.

ru-typography

In general, it turned out to be a good layout for the Russian language. On its basis we will make a Russian-Tatar united one. And we will save this one, so that Russian-Bashkir united, Russian-Udmurt united and any other can be made on its basis later.

Tatar letters

Finally, we add Tatar letters next to their pairs. The opening square and curly brackets had to be shifted, because Tatar letters are more important here (in the basic Russian layout, we will leave these symbols in place).

rtu

Done!

At the output we have two layouts. One is based on the other.

Russian (plus typographic symbols)

Russian (plus Tatar letters)

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