We have received a lot of positive feedback in the local community about our recent announcement for Internationalised Domain Names with Māori macrons. A question we were asked quite often was how you can actually enter special characters on an English keyboard layout. While most operating systems have character tables to help you entering letters of foreign alphabets, we now have an easier alternative for you online.

The Virtual Keyboard allows you to choose from different non-English keyboard layouts. You just need to change the respective language and can start typing in Chinese, Japanese, Greek or Hebrew. Unfortunately it doesn't support one of our favourite languages but Klingon still hasn't made it into the official UTF-8 standard... ;)

Here's an example using Russian:

IDN Punycode Converter

Another little domain tool for IDNs is our IDN Punycode converter. All Internationalised Domain Names are converted into ASCII characters using Punycode to make them readable in the Domain Name System (DNS). So instead of the domain müller.com, computers actually read xn--mller-kva.com. The tool might be helpful to find out the ASCII syntax of an IDN. Check out the IDN Punycode converter here.