Polish Alphabet on Windows Computer



Steps I am taking to get my computer to understand Polish

I have “Windows 98” and “Office 2000”.

Warning: You will probably need your “Windows” installation disk to get the “Polish” language activated. This disk came with your computer when you bought it.

Some advise: if you plan on doing substantial typing in Polish, you should also buy a Polish keyboard. The software installation described here is still mandatory, and is your first step, so go ahead and do it. For starters, you'll be able to do simple Polish typing with your existing US keyboard. Eventually, however, if you do a lot in Polish you will want to spend a few dollars to get the keyboard, so that you have properly labeled keys.

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Start up “Word”

Help(Microsoft Word Help

Type “language” into the little “search” window. Press Enter.

Install system support for multiple languages.

Pick “Install Multilanguage support in Windows 95 or Windows 98.

Tells me:

Start(Settings(Control Panel

Double click “Add/Remove Programs”

Click “Windows Setup”

It shows you a bunch of Components. Scroll down to

“Multilanguage Support” and put a check mark there.

Click on the “Details” button, which shows a list of language types; make sure that “Central European” is checked. Click the “OK” button to get out of “Details”.

This brings you back to the “Add/Remove Programs Properties” panel, (with the “Windows Setup” tab visible.) Click “Apply”. At this point, you may need to have the “Microsoft Windows 98, Second Edition” CD Rom available. (Or whatever version of you have; the point is, you might need your original “Install” disk that came with the computer.) Mostly, I think it affects the files in the “System/Fonts/” directory.

Reboot the computer.

Restart Word

Help(Microsoft Word Help

Type “language” into search window and press .

This time, choose

“Enable editing of multiple languages in Office programs”

Tells me:

Start(Programs(Microsoft Office Tools(Microsoft Office Language Settings

This brings up a panel with a tab labeled “Enabled Languages”. Make sure that “English” and “Polish” are checked. Then click on the “Apply” button to activate the choice and then “Ok” to exit the program.

Turning attention back to the “Help” page, there are two more paragraphs, the first of which mentions “Microsoft Office 2000 Proofing Tools”. I haven’t purchased those, so I skipped that. The second paragraph has a hot link for “install the correct keyboard layout”; click on that.

“Install keyboard layouts” instructs the user to do the following:

“Start(Settings(Control Panel” then from the Control Panel pick “Keyboard”

Next is either “Language” tab or “Input Locales” tab, depending on OS. Since I have Win-98 I was presented with “Language”, I clicked on that tab to display the Language

Panel. Here it showed that the only “Installed keyboard” was “[En] English (United States)”. I clicked on the “Add” button; this popped-up a panel called “Add Language”.

I scrolled through the list there and chose “Polish”, then clicked “Ok”. The Language

List now included “[PI] Polish”. This panel has some radio buttons, for now, just leave it set for “Left Alt+Shift”; (I will explain more about this in a later paragraph.) The check box “Enable indicator on task bar” has a check mark next to it, which is how I left it. I then clicked on the “Apply” button to activate the new settings, and then “Ok” to exit.

At that point, I quit “Word” and restarted it, just to be sure that it is properly synchronized.

Windows has a “Task Bar” that runs along the bottom of the computer monitor’s screen. (Technically, it doesn’t have to be at the bottom, it can be moved to one side, but most people just leave it at the bottom.) On the right hand side of the Task Bar there is something called the “System Tray”; you can easily identify the System Tray because, among other things, the current-time is usually shown here. Within the System Tray, there should now appear a (blue) square with the letters “En”. This indicates that the keyboard is set for “English”. You can now practice switching this indicator between “En” and “Pl”; which is to say, you can switch between having an “English” keyboard and a “Polish” keyboard. To change it to say “Pl” for “Polish”, press and hold down the left hand key, and then simultaneously press the key. (There are two keys on most keyboards, hence one of them is the “left ” and the other is the “right ” key.)

The Wild Ride

Using a U.S. keyboard to generate a Polish document can be very bizarre! (As Dorothy said to her pet dog: “Todo, I don’t think we’re in QWERTY anymore!”) You will definitely need to print out the following table and keep it nearby; it provides the mapping needed to find the Polish characters, and also to understand some (seemingly random) swapping of the meaning of keys. Note: the table probably will not look right until after you have performed the steps "Install Multi-language Support" and "Enable editing of multiple languages", as described above. That's because the Polish font has to be installed on your system before you can get the Polish letters to print.

| Polish "keyboard layout" expressed on US keyboard |

|U.S. keyboard row |U.S. key |English |Produces Polish |

| | |character |letter |

|alpha-1 | |y |z |

|alpha-1 | |Y |Z |

|alpha-1 | |[ |ż |

|alpha-1 | |{ |ń |

|alpha-1 | |] |ś |

|alpha-1 | |} |ć |

|alpha-1 | |\ |ó |

|alpha-1 | || |ź |

|alpha-2 | |; |ł |

|alpha-2 | |: |Ł |

|alpha-2 | ................
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