Getting data into applications by keyboards seems like one of the fundamentally simple features on Windows, but once you add additional issues like fonts/rendering engines it does not seem so simple anymore. It also turns out to be a bit more complicated when you add many different keyboard layouts on top of over 100 languages. Once you add the ability to define your own keyboard layouts (whether by using Microsoft interfaces or third party products) where all of Unicode can be supported, it becomes downright complex!

This presentation will talk about the interaction between input, fonts, and rendering engines, the many features that keyboard layouts support such as dead keys and ligatures, the issues with code pages vs. Unicode, when IMEs are preferred and when they are not, the collation issues that enter into the equation, and finally tools to make it all a bit easier.