There is a breathtaking amount of characters than can be used either in various languages or specialized fields of activity. Your standard keyboard only offers support for the most commonly used, to help you easily get around. Luckily, applications such as Keyboard Layout Manager give you the possibility to map nearly any character you need to a button on your keyboard and create custom layouts.

With roughly about 1 Mb of space taken on your hard disk drive and system resource consumption reduced to a minimum, your computer won't feel a thing from running it. The main window lets you select several options to get you started, such as language and layout, as well as the type of keyboard you are using.

In case you don't want to mess around with already existing types, you are free to create a new one. The next step brings up two more windows, one with a virtual keyboard and several options, while the other is where you select what character to attribute to a selected key.

The provided virtual keyboard is fully functional and besides major function buttons you are free to make use of any key. With at most three mouse clicks, a character is assigned. The application gives you the possibility to make use of several key combinations to map up to 6 characters per button.

A side panel lets you choose whether the selected symbol is for normal mode or in combination with shift, control and alt.

One of the biggest disadvantages is that specialized characters are slightly difficult to find. These are displayed in subsets, each containing a style of symbols, leaving you to navigate through all of them until the desired character is found.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Keyboard Layout Manager is a powerful tool with which key mapping is done easily. The interface provides quick accommodation due to the clever design, letting you create a custom layout in the blink of an eye. It truly shines when you need to work with special symbols and it becomes a pain to navigate through a lot of menus just to insert them.