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The Extra Keys tool panel

Type any accented characters for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Scandinavian languages. Also other special characters - this small Windows software tool enables simple input of letters and symbols that may not appear on your normal keyboard.

It has always been part of Plant Base, but is now also available as a separate stand-alone freeware utility. This software input panel can be used with almost any application, such as e-mail software, word processing, spreadsheets and so on.

Using the mouse, each letter will be typed directly into the selected application, at the current cursor position. The character is also copied to the Clipboard. In some situations, typing directly into another program is not allowed but the character can still be inserted by simply using Paste.

Clicking the button will refresh the available application list. Some may not accept input, but the panel has been used successfully with many programs.

All the characters are from the ANSI Latin-1 character set, suitable for use with Western European and US fonts. Extended Unicode characters for other regions are not provided by this version, but might be in a future development.

Some PC firewalls may complain when it is first run, as it sends data to other programs. It is safe to allow this. Extra Keys does not interfere with target application in any way other than sending keystrokes, exactly as you would from the keyboard.

The program is already included in the Plant Base installation. The downloads below are for stand-alone set-up. It is free and unrestricted. There is no registration, time limits, adverts or nags.

Extra Keys (version 2) is a replacement program for the older Extra Characters (version 1) and will only work on Window 2000 or later. Windows 9x and NT4 users should install the original. This is done automatically when installing as part of Plant Base.

This new version is a fully portable, self-contained program. The install file is for convienience only, as the program file + help file can just be copied anywhere. It is made with the remarkable PureBasic from Fantaisie Software.

The original Extra Characters will run on all versions of Windows from 95 onwards. It is written in VB6 and therefore requires the normal MS run-time libraries.

Instructions:

• Click a file link above (or right-click and Save Target as...).
• Save the file to any convienient location on your hard disk.
• Locate the downloaded file with Windows Explorer and run it by double-clicking.
• Follow the on-screen instructions.