Entering German characters quickly on a UK laptop

Question

I have a UK laptop (a Surface Book 2) with a UK layout, and I am learning German. That means I will regularly need to enter characters not present on the keyboard, and I am looking for an easy way to do that.

Charmap is impractical, as are the arcane three-digit character codes, and anyway, I have no Numpad.

Microsoft has catered to Americans by giving them a US international keyboard layout with quick shortcuts, for example, Alt+Y and Alt+P. But it's no good in the UK since many symbol characters are in the wrong place here. For example, " should be on 2, not @ (there are several others). It's fundamentally a US layout, and my keyboard isn't a US keyboard, so, unfortunately, it's no good.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/KB_US-International.svg/2880px-KB_US-International.svg.png

The UK extended seems layout to be the best on offer in the UK. It looks like someone started with all good intentions but gave up as soon as French characters were covered. There's no support for German characters at all. They are only on the US layout, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/KB_United_Kingdom_Ext.png

II can't imagine Microsoft has only made this feature available to Americans when it seems like a simple thing applicable everywhere, and in general, WIndows' international support is excellent. Surely all it needs is a little work in the keyboard editor? Or is that something everyone in the UK that wants to enter German has to do themselves?

I hope I have explained this clearly, and I can't help feeling I'm missing something!

This page here is not an official link, but it's where my information is coming from.

How to write Umlaut ä, ü, ö, ß without a German keyboard - Confident German

Thanks.

*** Moved from windows Category by Microsoft Moderator

Answer 1

Hi AJP_850,

Thank you for reaching Microsoft Community and apologies for the inconvenience this has caused you.

Please submit a request for this feature to Microsoft through our Feedback Hub to let our developers know the need of this feature. See: Send feedback to Microsoft with the Feedback Hub app for details.

Kind regards,

Marrion

Answer 2

Thanks for confirming I’m not missing anything. I was able to make my own layout, which I guess confirms that there’s no fundamental reason to not do it out of the box.

I’ve also found this works fairly well on an iPad with hardware keyboard (Option+U then type the character).

I’ll submit as you suggest.