Russian Phonetic Keyboard Qwerty (Яверты) for Windows

After installing Windows 7 I was looking for a Russian phonetic keyboard (the one I used for XP from kovrik.com stopped working for me) but could not find a good one.

There is a standard Russian keyboard coming with a windows installation but then you need to put some stickers on your keyboard. I you are lazy to put stickers, you need a keyboard where Russian A corresponds to English A, П to P, Р to R, С to S, etc. Even though it is quite a challenge to map 33 Russian letters to 26 Latin ones, you can be pretty close.

This phonetic keyboard is called ЯВЕРТЫ (5 Russian letters on the top left corner).

Thanks to the good guys from Microsoft, now it is easy to create a new keyboard layout for Windows. It should work for Windows 7 and XP, as well as Windows server editions.

Here is the layout I created:

Here how it looks when you press a Shift key:

And here how it is when pressing either Ctrl or Alt Gr + Ctrl keys:

Installation Instructions.

• Download the package as a zip file from here and unzip it to a temp directory.
• Run setup.exe in the package.

That's it. A new Russian text layout called Russian Яверты will be installed and visible in the Installed Programs. You can also uninstall it from there.

On the task bar in the bottom right corner you should the language bar (press Alt-Shift to switch between languages and Ctrl-Shift to switch between keyboard layouts). Choose  Russian Яверты layout:

If you don't see this language bar, go to Control Panel -> Clock, Language, and Region -> Change Keyboards and add the corresponding keyboard and layout in the General tab.

There is a bug on Windows XP - the layout is installed but you do not see it when you click on the keyboard icon as on the Windows 7 screenshot above. To get around this, do the following. Open the keyboard settings (Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages -> Details -> Settings) and add the new Russian Яверты layout by clicking on "Add..." and choosing Russian Яверты from a list of keyboard layouts for Russian. You will get something like this:

Then clik on "Key Settings.." and assign a key sequence to the new layout, e.g. Ctrl+Shift+0:

Click OK and save the settings.
Now to enable the new Russian layout just use the assigned sequence (e.g. Ctrl+Shift+0).
Strangely enough, sometimes you need to press the key sequence (Ctrl+Shift+0) twice to enable the layout.
Also the new layout won't be visible on the taskbar. Time to migrate to Windows 7?