Arkku Dvorak (for Finnish)

[Mikaela]

Two common characters required to type Finnish, ‘ä’ and ‘ö’, are not present in the US/English Dvorak layout. Since there is no Finnish standard for Dvorak, I made my own with the idea that I wanted it to be fully backward-compatible with regular Dvorak. My ArkkuDvorak[3] layout accomplishes this by exploiting the fact that Finnish (and other international) keyboards have one more key than US keyboards; this “extra” key becomes a combined ä/ö key.

3 I did not intend to name the layout after myself, but the original filename stuck after I shared the layout with others.

The way ArkkuDvorak works is that the extra key, located to the right of the right Shift key, produces ‘ä’ when pressed normally but ‘ö’ when pressed together with Shift. This sounds quite unorthodox at first, but it works very well in practice since the capital ‘Ä’ and especially ‘Ö’ are seldom needed. The uppercase letters are still available via Alt Gr-a and Alt Gr-o, along with many other special symbols and dead keys under other Alt Gr combinations.

• http://arkku.com/dvorak/