Inputting Esperanto text on computers

There are a number of methods to input Esperanto letters and text on a computer, e.g. when using a word processor or email.

All modern email clients and servers accept Unicode text as UTF-8 in at least one of the following Content-Transfer-Encoding types: 8bit, quoted-printable, or base64.

[1] The US international layout can type the circumflex over vowels, but needs to be modified to enable Esperanto letters.

An "Esperanto-Internacia" or "Esperanto-International" keyboard is available that assigns the keys Q W X Y to ⟨ĥ ŭ ŝ ĵ⟩ and the sequences DY TX to ⟨ĝ ĉ⟩.

Since 2009 it has been very easy to add key combinations for accented Esperanto letters to one's usual keyboard layout, at least in Gnome and KDE, no download is required.

The options to choose are "Adding Esperanto circumflexes (supersigno)" and the appropriate keyboard layout (Qwerty or Dvorak).

There is a special eo_XX.UTF-8 locale available at Bertil Wennergren's home page, along with a thorough explanation of how one implements Unicode and the keyboard in Linux.

If necessary, install and use high quality fonts that have Esperanto glyphs, like Microsoft Web core fonts (free for personal use) or DejaVu (The Bitstream Vera glyphs have the Bitstream Vera license and DejaVu extensions are in public domain).

On macOS systems Esperanto characters can be entered by selecting a keyboard layout from the "Input Sources" pane of "Language & Text" preferences, found in the "System Preferences" application, and the pre-installed ABC Extended keyboard layout can be used to type Esperanto's diacritics.

In OS X it is also possible to create one's own keyboard layouts, so it is relatively easy to have more convenient mappings, like for example one based on typing an x after the letter.

Dead-circumflex followed by a consonant may or may not work for ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ; and if nothing else avails, ù is a tolerable if imperfect approximation for ŭ.