International Character Input

v2.0 - Added Greek & Cyrillic keyboards, full Vietnamese coverage, more special characters, more entity names instead of code #s, character not found warnings, and more efficient code.

Instructions
No information entered here is saved, and none of it is sensitive. The data is not even sent anywhere, it's all kept within your browser.

Select a diacritic and case, then click or type the desired letter. For special characters, it does not matter which case is selected. If the combination you select is not part of the supported characters, a warning message will flash briefly in between the text and HTML boxes. If the warning beep option is checked, a little beep will also sound. The beep sound is only supported by newer browsers. If a character is found that meets your specifications, the character will be entered into the text box and it's corresponding HTML code will appear in the HTML box. Do not attempt to edit the HTML box. It is for read/copy only. Upper case keyboard input overrides lower case selection on this page, but lowercase keyboard input will be transformed by upper case selection on this page. Shift-Clicking the on-screen keyboard will not yield upper case letters as you might expect. Sorry.

You can select from various on-screen keyboards to input characters from practically any left to right alphabet. Your computer's keyboard remains mapped as it normally is, only the on-screen keyboard changes. In some cases, you can get letters with combined diacritics by selecting a diacritic from the table to be combined with a character in the row below the 'space bar'. If that combination is available as a supported UTF character, it will be added to the text and html boxes. Otherwise, it will trigger the warning. You should always enter characters from the on-screen keyboard associated with your language, even if there are letters on other on-screen keyboards that look identical, because the underlying UTF code number will be different. I.E., when creating a Greek word starting with Epsilon ('E' - UTF 0x395), enter the 'E' from the Greek keyboard. The 'E's on the latin keyboard (UTF 0x45) and Cyrillic keyboard (UTF 0x415) look identical, but the generated HTML code is quite different in each case.

You can also paste text from other documents into the text field and all the characters will automatically be converted to HTML, even if some characters are not supported by this page's input tool, as long as the pasted text is properly encoded UTF-8 text. Most extended characters are displayed as character code numbers in HTML. However, to improve legibility of the HTML, selected characters are displayed using their entity names. When using the generated HTML in your own document, be sure your charset encoding is specified as UTF-8 or else some characters will not be correctly mapped in your end user's browser.

UPDATE: Nov 2016 - These days, as long as your page specifies the UTF-8 character set be used, there is no longer any need to use HTML entities. All modern browsers will correctly render the actual characters in your content. This tool was created back when browser support was erratic and HTML entities were the only reliable way to ensure the correct characters are displayed in various browsers throughout the world. Despite there no longer being any need to use HTML entitites, this tool is still very useful for typing foreign characters that are not supported by your keyboard. This is far better than hunting for the correct characters in MS Word's special character insertion tool, which totally fails as a decent user interface!

Some really old browsers do not support selection/cursor coordinate properties, so in this case, while editing text in the text box, new characters will always be added to the end of the current text, regardless of cursor locations. All recent browsers for quite some time support coordinate properties, so you really need to upgrade your browser if you are experiencing this issue. Older Mozilla (Firefox, Netscape, Sea Monkey) browsers convert the   to a normal space character, if you experience this, again, it's time to upgrade your browser.

Romanian S and T with comma below do not exist in most western fonts, use S and T with cedilla instead (the T cedilla looks the same in most fonts anyways). Multiple diacritics, such as unicode 0x1EA4-0x1ED9 (used mostly in Vietnamese) are mostly supported by combining diacritics with the on-screen characters below the 'space bar'. What you end up with in your document will depend on the characters actually supported by the font you are using (or in the case of HTML, the font that your end user is using). Many fonts do not support all the characters that can be represented here. You can verify your font's support with the Character Chart. On newish browsers, it's possible to send a font to the end user's browser to use for displaying your content by using the @font-face rule in your CSS.

It is difficult to correctly map the over 600 possible characters, I likely made several mistakes despite all my error checking efforts. If you cannot get a character to come up that you know is in a common language's alphabet, or the wrong character comes up, please let me know about the problem. E-mail me at JavaScript needs to be enabled, explaining which selections you made, which key you pressed, what you thought you would get, and what you actually got, if anything. Your help in tracking down these errors is greatly appreciated.