What you get with Windows?

In the standard installation Microsoft Windows comes with a set of predefined keyboard layouts too choose from. For Polish users (or users of the Polish language version) the choice is to use a so-called "Polish layout" (which has a considerably different layout than the typical US QWERTY layout) or "Polish programmer's layout." The latter works well with US QWERTY keyboards because all Polish diacritical characters are accessed using right-alt key.

  What is here?

This is an enhanced version of the "Polish programmer's" keyboard. All Polish diacritical characters are being accessed using right-alt key, but there are many more characters available (e.g. the euro sign – €).

  How it works?

When installed and activated, the keyboard driver inserts a specific Unicode character into the application owning the cursor focus. If the application is Unicode aware, it will display the pressed character without problems. However, not every application is Unicode aware, especially older applications are not (Microsoft applications and the system itself are Unicode aware). When an older non-Unicode application receives a keyboard character, the character has to be translated by the system to one of the available 256 characters from a predefined set called a codepage. If the character does not exist in the codepage used by the application, a question mark will be displayed instead. There is little that can be done about it (except for upgrading the application to a newer Unicode-aware version). One thing is to let the application use the codepage that contains the characters you want to use. The codepage with Polish letters is CP1250. However, not all characters used by this keyboard layout are included by that codepage. Also, although most applications follow Windows settings in choosing the codepage they use, some use a hardcoded codepage that cannot be changed.