IJ in a monowidth unicase typeface

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  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    edited September 2020
    Theunis de Jong said:
    I haven't ever seen a physical keyboard with a dedicated IJ key (next to, rather than in place of an `Y`, which would be marginally acceptable), and the Wikipedia page I consulted bore a [citation needed].

    Dutch typewriters with an IJ key? I have found some pictured online.

    An Olympia from 1935:

    and a Brother 220 typewiter that is much more recent:

    so I can at least prove to the skeptics that they existed.

    Ah, here is another - a blog posting by a mystery writer on his typewriter collection.


    As I've noted, in the era when ASCII was strictly a 7-bit code, before the IJ character was one of those dropped from the ISO 8859-1 standard intended to serve all of Europe, ASCII terminals were available in national languages, and thus I do believe you could have found computer terminals with an IJ key in the 1970s.

    However, the Dutch keyboard layout currently defined in Microsoft Windows does not include an IJ key - which is not surprising, as the many international keyboard layouts for DOS 5 were defined after ISO 8859-1, but before UNICODE, which does include a code for IJ. So, indeed, you won't find a PC keyboard with an IJ key.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    Although a manual typewriter is definitely physical, however, doubtless you were lookig for something computer-related.
    I have finally been able to establish that there was indeed at least one ASCII computer terminal that was available with a modified code that included the lowercase ij character (but not the upper-case one) as opposed to the official ISO 646 code for the Netherlands, which did not include it.
    The VT220 from the Digital Equipment Corporation.
    I haven't yet been able to find a photo of the keyboard from a specimen using that code, however.

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