Keyboards

Keyboards have different layouts. If you wanna become a professional typist, you should know of different keyboard layouts. Different keyboard layouts comes with different region they are being used. QWERTY keyboards is mainly used in english speaking regions. Another type of keyboard is AZERTY keyboard. It is usually found in french speaking regions.

QWERTY
QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters (keys) appearing in the top left letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the same year, when it first appeared in typewriters. It became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, and remains in use on electronic keyboards due to the network effect of a standard layout and a belief that alternatives fail to provide very significant advantages. The use and adoption of the QWERTY keyboard is often viewed as one of the most important case studies in open standards because of the widespread, collective adoption and use of the product, particularly in the United States.

AZERTY
AZERTY is a specific layout for the characters of the Latin alphabet on typewriter keys and computer keyboards. The layout takes its name from the first six letters to appear on the first row of alphabetical keys. Like the German QWERTZ layout, it is modeled on the English QWERTY layout, and it is used by most French speakers based in Europe, though France and Belgium each have their own national variations on the layout. The French speaking part of Switzerland uses the Swiss QWERTZ keyboard. Most of the citizens of Quebec, the French-speaking province of Canada, use a QWERTY keyboard that has been adapted to the French language, although the government of Quebec and the Canadian federal government stipulate and use the Multilingual Standard keyboard CAN/CSA Z243.200-92.

QWERTZ
The QWERTZ or QWERTZU keyboard is a widely used computer and typewriter keyboard layout that is mostly used in Central Europe. The name comes from the first six letters at the top left of the keyboard: Q, W, E, R, T, and Z.

The QWERTZ layout differs from the QWERTY layout in four major ways:

The positions of the "Z" and "Y" keys are switched, this change being made for two major reasons:

"Z" is a much more common letter than "Y" in German; the latter rarely appears outside words whose spellings reflect either their importation from a foreign language or the Hellenization of an older German form under the influence of Ludwig I of Bavaria.

"T" and "Z" often appear next to each other in the German orthography, and placing the two keys next to each other minimizes the effort needed for typing the two characters in sequence (cf. the use of a single-block tz ligature in many early mechanical printing presses using fraktur typefaces).

Part of the keyboard is adapted to include umlauted vowels (ä, ö, ü).

The placements of some special symbols and command keys are changed, some of special key inscriptions are changed from an abbreviation to a graphical symbol (for example "Caps Lock" becomes a hollow arrow pointing down, "Backspace" becomes a left-pointing arrow), and most of the other abbreviations are replaced by German abbreviations (thus e.g. "Ctrl" for "control" is translated to its German equivalent "Strg" for "Steuerung"). "Esc" for "escape" is not translated however.

Like many other non-English keyboards, QWERTZ keyboards usually change the right Alt key into an Alt Gr key to access a third level of key assignments. This is necessary because the umlauts and some other special characters leave no room to have all the special symbols of ASCII, needed by programmers among others, available on the first or second (shifted) levels without unduly increasing the size of the keyboard.

HCESAR
HCESAR (pronounced by saying the name of the letter H and then the word César: in Portuguese, agá-César) is an obsolete typewriter keyboard layout. It was created by decree on July 21, 1937, by Portuguese prime minister António de Oliveira Salazar.

It was common that the 0 numeral was omitted (in favour of using the uppercase O letter), and there were also some typewriters without the 1 numeral (with the lowercase L being used to achieve it). Also absent were symbols such as the exclamation mark (achieved by typing an apostrophe and overwriting it with a period using the backspace key), the asterisk (achieved in a similar way, with lowercase X and the plus or minus sign — for eight- or six-pointed asterisks, respectively), the number sign (which was achieved by some through intricate methods involving partial depressions of the backspace key to overwrite the equals sign with two forward slashes), and the inequality sign (typing an equals sign and overwriting it with one forward slash).

This keyboard layout was the official layout of typewriters in public administration and most private companies until the mid-1970s, when it began to be replaced by the AZERTY layout.